Maia Lynch: In Between

Maia Lynch (b. 1974) explores the fragmentary nature of contemporary identity through painting, ceramics, and videos. Her experience living in between American and Japanese cultures inspires her works, in which the past enters into conversation with the present, bringing with it the potential for grief as well as transformation.

In 2016, Lynch received a Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, allowing her to return to her mother’s birthplace of Shikoku, the smallest and least populated of Japan’s four main islands. 

The works on view raise questions about center versus periphery, unsettled identities, what it feels like to belong to multiple communities, and the potential of what is unfixed. Inherent in her works are ideas of loss, grief, trauma, birth, renewal, dislocation, and growth. “I left [Japan] with a sense of having time travelled,” Lynch writes, “a sense of belonging to two different places that cannot be physically or psychologically reconciled.”

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.