Maisie Cousins' photograph "Snails" bursts with vivid purples and blues, showcasing delicate cabbage leaves adorned with snails, contrasted against a textured backdrop. The composition creates an unexpected harmony between organic forms and everyday objects, such as broken eggshells. Cousins' style is a dynamic interplay of beauty and repulsion, employing close-up, saturated imagery to evoke visceral reactions. Her work invites viewers to embrace the chaotic elegance of natural decay and domestic mess, challenging perceptions of beauty and disgust. ...
Maisie Cousins’ photographic practice marries beauty and disgust, interweaving food, trash, flesh, insects and decay into a kaleidoscopic world of colour. Seeing things through Cousins’ eyes takes us into a bright and saturated Wonderland of toys, icecream, lips, stomachs and tongues, smears of lipstick, jelly and juice. It’s our bins, sinks and childhood bedrooms visualised by Barbie, coloured in by toddlers. It’s glorious, nauseating, glossy and stunning. Cousins’ compositions take us into a fever dream journey through a visceral, grotesque circus show. Her practice encourages us to let go of our societally imposed niceties, to eat in the nude, to spill, to smear, to befriend the trails of ants on the plate of dessert from the other night that we left on our floor. Be dirty, be trashy, be happy and be beautiful, all at the same time. ...
