“My work has always been focused on the pressure for the feminine ideal, and all the bombarding messages,” said the artist. “It has plagued me in terms of how to show up in the world and how we show ourselves externally versus the messier internal world.”
Female figures boldly push into the viewer’s space with hand or foot in her show “In Your Face” at Lanoue Gallery through Nov. 1.
A Jane Maxwell piece, “In Your Face.” Jane Maxwell Studio
“Stop making me subliminally feel somehow unworthy because of who I am and how I’m aging,” said Maxwell, 61.
But it’s never that easy. “The other side of me is like, ‘Oh, well, I have an event coming up, or I’m feeling particularly wrinkly,” she said. “The next thing I know, I’m getting an injection in my face.”
The exhibition, said the artist, is “a no-judgment zone.”
Botox vials are among the materials Jane Maxwell used to create art in her show, “In Your Face.” Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Where to find her: www.instagram.com/janemaxwellstudio/
Originally from: Wayland
Lives in: Beacon Hill
Making a living: When Maxwell first set out to sell her art in her 30s, she used tools she’d developed as a marketing professional in her 20s. She asked herself: “What’s my competitive advantage? How can my collage be different than other collages? What’s not really in the marketplace?” She’s had shows around the U.S., and her art earns her keep, she said.
A sculptural lamp, “Shiny Objects,” Jane Maxell made using Botox vials.Jane Maxwell Studio
Studio: The artist and two assistants work in a large studio filled with labeled barrels of colored paper and buckets of other finds, like Botox packaging provided by Maxwell’s daughter, a nurse anesthetist.
How she started: When her daughters were small, the artist saw them playing with paper dolls. “I remember looking at my little girls and I’m like, ‘oh boy, are they in for it,’” she said. “Clothes don’t always fit. It’s not a simple, one-dimensional situation.”
“I took those paper dolls and started deconstructing them and creating them out of other materials,” she said. It was her first series.
Jane Maxwell rips apart scavenged billboard paper, one of her favorite materials, in her studio. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Why she loves collage: “It’s the layering,” she said. She finds that in a favorite material, too: Billboard papers, pasted one atop the next.
“Once you start peeling back, you’ve just got all these gorgeous layers, and there’s text and you never know what you’re going to find.” Maxwell said, tearing through some on a worktable. “I’m excavating. Which is so much of the theme. What’s on top, what’s underneath? What are we showing? What’s hidden?”
Some of the materials in Jane Maxwell’s studio.Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
How she works: “I just start gluing,” Maxwell said. “It’s very meditative and I love it.”
Then she finds the right feminine silhouette in a photo, erases everything but the outline to create a drawing, and blows it up on a large-scale printer. Once figures are on her background, she collages on their clothing.
Advice for artists: “Embrace mistakes,” Maxwell said. Spilled glue, a flooded studio – “some of my most amazing discoveries” have come that way, she said.
A mixed media piece filled with Botox fials in the studio of Jane Maxwell. A larger version is in her show “In Your Face” at Lanoue Gallery.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff