Edith Maybin, Untitled #15, The Tenby Document, 2006. Digital chromogenic dye coupler print, 33 x 26 inches (83.8 x 66 cm). Edition of 10. Signed, dated, numbered and titled.

Edith Maybin (b.1969 Canada) graduated in 2006 with an MA (Distinction) from the Swansea Institute of Art, UK and went on to win the title of Free Range 2006 Photographer of the Year; Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London.

Maybin has also been selected for the AXA Art Photographic Portrait Commission with the National Museum of Wales. Maybin’s work is now part of the permanent collections of The National Museum Wales; The National Portrait Gallery, London; and The Sir Elton John Photography Collection.
Maybin now works from Canada and the UK.

The Tenby Document
In these photographs Edith Maybin investigates the space between mother and daughter. She takes portraits in a home environment where she and her daughter enact secret stories together whist wearing Marks and Spencer undergarments, a gesture towards Maybin’s own mother and an investigation into female rituals and sentimental inheritance.

These secret stories they then replay until the camera captures the mother and daughter separately in the same position. This allows for digital reassembly and the final presentation of the two as one. Maybin digitally places her five-year-old daughter’s head on her own body; the photograph resolving the dichotomy of the relationship. In closing the gap between mother and daughter these images, whilst formal, subversively provide room for fantasy, identity reversal, and reveried escape.

Inspired by Lady Clementina Hawarden’s photographic tableaux of her daughters, Maybin and daughter paradoxically elude the gaze by way of imaginative abstraction into a place, like Vermeer’s women, intangible.
(edithmaybin.com)