Working primarily with textiles, discarded clothing, and handwritten text, Georgina Maxim approaches material as a conduit of lived histories, accumulating meaning through repetition, revision and care. Borrowed Books and Underlined Statements (2023-2026) is an ongoing installation made up of red stitched fabric panels that bear fragments of text gleaned from borrowed books. It is both an offering and an intervention: a process of knowledge-making marked by intimacy rather than authority. In this iteration, the artist introduces black stitched panels, interrupting and complicating the red field, suggesting that reading, like memory, is never singular or innocent.
33 Letters of Knowing You Will Reply (2026) is composed of correspondence between the artist and her sister, who died at thirty-three, accompanied by fragments of her sister’s clothing – a quiet reckoning with loss, and a private archive now made public. Each individually stitched letter is placed within fine silk cloth recalling the envelopes in which they were delivered. Together, these works position writing, reading and stitching as acts of survival and continuity. Text appears as the residue of quiet days and lifelong relationships. Rather than monumentalise grief or knowledge, Maxim allows them to accumulate through touch, time and repetition.
—Renée Akitelek Mboya
