Seth Maximen

My practice explores the apprehension between the familiar and the surreal, enigmatic. Working primarily in paint, I frequently integrate mixed media to expand texture, depth, and narrative, allowing each piece to move fluidly between the seen and the felt.



Reflecting the complexity and volatility of the contemporary socio-political landscape, my work emerges from an affective transference—where emotion, memory, and perception intersect to reconfigure how the world is both experienced and represented. This curiosity traces back to childhood, when I watched my mother draw a swan—a moment that revealed how something living could materialise from a single, deliberate line.



As a person of African-Caribbean heritage and having been raised in the English suburbs, I have long inhabited a duality of belonging and estrangement. This oscillation continues to inform the tone and subject of my practice, embedding within it a quiet sense of displacement and layered identity.



Art has become both a site of refuge and a mode of reflection. During my late adolescence and early adulthood, as I grappled with questions of selfhood and faith, my visual language turned toward the uncanny—spaces that felt at once intimate and disquieting. Throug...