The work: Maria Flourou, Expired, 2023. Digital art utilising mobile photography,
50 x 50cm. Courtesy: the artist.
The practice of Brisbane-based artist Maria Flourou is almost painterly, mixing and layering pictorial elements rather than paint. Her approach to image-making involves stacking photographs taken on a mobile phone, one atop the other, until they meld into one surreal landscape of colour and form. Fittingly, then, Flourou describes the work Expired with the phrase “a feeling of ageing in a dreamlike world” – a perfect summary of a kaleidoscope vista, dominated by phantom faces, fading words and an iridescent cityscape. In this piece, she has taken advantage of the immediacy of mobile photography, capturing her home city in micro and macro form. The landscape seems almost small amongst the scrawling writing found in hidden corners of Brisbane, the life that lives within dwarfing the physicality of place. The sense of decay and dereliction often associated with scenes of graffiti and peeling paint is here turned on its head, combining to become, instead, objects of beauty. Layered within these urban scenes is a self-portrait of the artist, dominating the scene, her face partially obscured by a smear of paint. This melding of images, colour and scale makes this an unconventional portrait: one of the artist and one of her home.