Maggie Preston

Instagram: @maggieprestonstudio

Website: http://www.maggiepreston@gmail.com

Bio: Maggie Preston is a photo-based artist who lives & works in Berkeley. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts. Preston is also a neurodivergent mother, educator, swimmer, and forever-learner.

Statement: Visual artist Maggie Preston bends various photographic processes, exploring temporal shifts in the medium and personal identity. She weaves digital photography with analog actions, like hand-cutting and darkroom photography, into her process. Preston works and reworks old artwork and personal ephemera, creating process-based photographic compositions that are also accumulations of time. In other works, the accretion occurs through digital layering and other editing techniques. Much of her recent work is based on an exquisitely personal shift in her life- that of becoming a mother. The photographs in Prehistory are created as a kind of collaboration between mother and child. Preston explores her toddler son’s earliest attempt of image-making, abstract markings drawn on paper. She meticulously cuts his scribbles out of the paper, and photographs these ephemeral forms. The pigment prints explore a young child’s pre-representational marks, and at the same time, these black & white abstractions portray the artist-mother clawing her way back to her creative practice after the hiatus of early motherhood.