The Knot

CATALOGUE ESSAY BY ANDREW STEPHENS 2026

Storytelling is special: when done well, it expresses the most powerful qualities and experiences of human beings. Yet, along with “family”, this word has been co-opted by marketing strategists. In their hands, storytelling has become “content” in service to a brand, helping “consumers” on their “journey” as “part of the [insert company name] family”.

How refreshing to counter this with the simple act of standing quietly before works created by Marise Maas. Hers is an authentic telling of stories, many of which are related to family, with emotions tenderly distilled. In her paintings and works-on-paper, the tales being told are sketched-out, the imagery always magnificently open to multiple readings. While these anecdotes might spring from the particular, they speak to broader human experience. 

Take Sliced, in whose presence the zingy-green aroma of a freshly cut apple is almost detectable (and delectable). Here, the up-close imagery springs from Maas’s observation of oddly sliced pieces of apple being habitually left around the house by a sibling. A viewer may not know that true story, but they will know of apple-ness; they will have their own apple histories and memories, which might rise to the surface when looking at this painting.

Or there is Glasshouses and Paddocks, delicately capturing something archetypal beneath its beautiful landscape. Likewise, the surface activity in Moving On soon gives way to something more profound, as these noble-looking horses steadfastly traverse a turning wheel. Is this the wheel, the original, the one people keep re-inventing, the wheel of life and of time? 

In conversation, Maas alludes to recent personal experiences that might have provoked the imagery in these works. There is the death of her father, the sorting out of all that was left behind, interactions with relatives, and her own facing into the stark realities of mortal existence – the things all people find themselves grappling with at some point in their lives. Like the horses in Moving On, Maas, along with all sentient beings, must tread the turning wheel of life until it stops.

The horse image recurs for Maas. While she may laugh about the curious and persistent phenomenon of young teenage girls being besotted with horses, she is also intrigued by it. She was one of them. During her freedom-yearning “horsey years”, she moved from the Netherlands, where she would save up money to take pony-riding lessons, to Tasmania’s north-west coast where she rode amid far greater expanses. In recent years, horses have become prominent in her art and she says she has simply “gone with” the horses.

There they are in works such as Between The Flags, with its evocative semi-submersion, and The Sun Between Us, where a powerful connection is described. Or how about Slide On Down and The Knot – who has not felt like this? The sheer joy and freedom of sliding on down is, curiously, so close to that feeling of nauseous tension when the gut is in a knot. Maas divines these very human things for us, telling these gentle stories with warmth.