Rebecca Maes has worn many masks in her 40 years. She grew up in a Pentecostal community which had a profound impact on her psyche, particularly in relation to conformity and faith. She went on to study anthropology, linguistics and microbiology, opening her up to new perspectives and after moving overseas she was eventually able to ask herself some tough questions. Growing up in a creative family Rebecca expressed herself through music from a young age, however in recent years visual arts has become her focus taking inspiration from a vast array of artistic styles and endless encouragement from her father, Melbourne based artist Andrew Maes. Her current practice, centering around collage explores the quiet brutality of expectation, where her womanhood is sculped by both internal and external forces and conditioned through roles that do not feel as if they belong to her. It examines how society strips the sacred from the feminine, replacing it with constructs of power, dominance and conformity.
