Maisie Maud Broadhead

2020

My sister Bella, has appeared in my images from my very first experiments with photography at the Royal College of Art over ten years ago. Since then, Bella has appeared in many different guises ‘The intimacy of our relationship means we communicate with ease, Bella’s beauty is gentle and touching. I see myself in her, and more importantly, she has a quality of openness and stillness when I am looking at her, which points to a more general human condition.’

2019

Rear Window, a set of five sculptural installation pieces, was specially commissioned for a major show at the UK’s National Glass Centre in 2019. Broadhead was inspired by her neighbour's discarded Victorian sash windows during their building works. The artist collected and hung them in her studio, spending many months with them before arriving at her final idea for the series, in which she creates the Hitchcockian rooms and worlds beyond the window frames.

Ambiguity, a recurrent theme in Broadhead's work, lies at the heart of these images:

‘There is no easy narrative. As with real neighbours, in the glimpses we have into each other’s lives, knowledge is partial, obscured by our own preconceptions.’ (Annie Warburton, Through the Looking Glass: Caroline Broadhead and Maisie Broadhead, 2019).

2019

September 2019 - spring 2020.

Commissioned by the National Trust, Gitta Gschwendtner has invited 5 fellow designers to create seating in response to 17th century Fenton House in Hampstead. Gitta Gschwendtner, Carl Clerkin, Frith Kerr, Maisie Broadhead, Michael Marriott and Nina Tolstrup invite you to slow down, sit down and look again in this exciting collision of old and new.

'My chair is a response to the last occupant of Fenton House, Lady Binning. She was widowed relatively young. Anecdote has it that she became reclusive and wore ‘strange mourning clothes’ long after the death of her husband. I have cloaked a chair with fabric which merges into the carpet of the Drawing Room. The chair becomes fixed or trapped in the room. I like the notion that while in a reclusive state you become ‘part of the furniture’, intergral to the house.’

photos by Oskar Proctor

2016

Maisie Broadhead: Pearls
 

Manchester Art Gallery

October 2018 - February 2019

ReFrame is current exhibition on display at the Manchester Art Gallery. The show is a collaboration between Maisie and Caroline Broadhead presenting new works made in response to Manchester Art Gallery’s historic painting collection.

2014

Peepers was a site specific installation at the Brighton Pavilion, UK, commissioned by the Brighton Pavilion and Arts Council, England. The work consists of five large duratran lightbox units installed into the Pavilion's decadent Music Room, creating the illusion of a new view beyond the windows of the room.

The installation is inspired by the scrutiny experienced by the Pavilion's original resident, George IV, from a society which became obsessed, fascinated, intrigued, even disgusted by his life in the extravagant Royal Pavilion and detached from the reality of the outside world.

2013

A three minute short film by Maisie Broadhead and Jack Cole, commissioned and exhibited by the National Gallery, London for the 'Seduced By Art' exhibition. The film has also screened on Channel 4 in the UK.

By recreating a photographic portrait of Lady Eastlake (1843-1848), by the pioneering photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, the film lays bare the many tricks and illusions at work in the construction of a single staged image.

2019

An insurance Policy is a new piece of work made with the National Glass Centre. The triptych of stained glass windows references the art form’s ecclesiastical history but theses are housed within the ubiquitous domestic UPVC windows.

2009-12

A collection of photography and accompanying jewellery. Each photograph is a modern day re-interpretation of a historical painting where jewellery is at the centre of the image’s meaning. Accompanying jewellery act as key props within each of the images. When depicted in the photograph the jewellery appears traditional and unremarkable, but experienced physically we witness illusion is at work.

2014

The First Book of Fashion is a series that tells a fictional modern-day narrative that is inspired by Matthäus Schwarz, a 16th century German accountant, who recorded his clothes in what has become known as 'The First Book of Fashion'.

A Young Man's Progress was a collaboration between two sisters; Maisie Broadhead, and Isabella Newell and Professor Ulinka Rublack, cultural historian at Cambridge University.

http://thefirstbookoffashion.tumblr.com/

2014

A photographic series portraying studies of three generations of women from the artist's immediate family. The series references the iconic, repeating compositional styles of two historical painters - Johannes Vermeer and Vilhelm Hammershøi.

2013

A series of objects and images commissioned for the Jerwood Makers Open.

This series re-works the Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese’s series Allegory of Love (1575), drawing on Broadhead's personal experience and family history. Four images with accompanying objects interpret these four different facets: Scorn; Unfaithfulness; Respect and Happy Union. Central to each of the four tableaux is a three-dimensional prop, handmade from wood, glass, plastic and metal. Each choice of material and its manifestation is symbolic and key to the narrative within the final work

2011

A joint project between mother and daughter. ‘Taking the Chair’ was Caroline and Maisie Broadhead’s first major artistic collaboration. The collection is inspired by seven paintings by masters such as Vermeer, Velasquez and Magritte, in which a chair has a powerful presence. The chair is the point at which Caroline and Maisie’s work meets, showing seven of Maisie’s photographs, which feature seven of Caroline’s chairs, with image and object displayed alongside each other.

2014

2008

A photographic re-enactment of one of William Hogarth's 'The Rake's Progress' paintings using Broadhead's immediate family, turning Hogarth's 'The Heir' into an unusual family portrait.

The image exhibited (or hid) amongst prints of Hogarth's original paintings in Pitzhanger Manor, London as part of the 'Bottom Drawers' exhibition.

2012

Broadhead's friends and family masquerade as peculiar Victorian portraits.

2011

Portrait of potter Alison Britton referencing Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. Alison holds a 13th – 14th century English earthenware jug from Bernard Leach’s source collection, Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, UK, surrounded by a number of her own works.

Created for the exhibition Memoranda at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, UK. An exhibition that casts the light of memory on contemporary artworks and on items from the collections from the Crafts Study Centre, curated by Tessa Peters and Janice West and including works by Maisie Broadhead, Stephen Dixon, Laura Potter and Elaine Wilson.

2008

18ct Gold clips, ikea paper and glass

2008

A installation at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, part of the exhibition Bottom Drawers.

2007

Domestic Jewellery was a collection of silver jewellery.