Merlin MAeKES

I am an artist and therapist exploring how mapping and memory overlap through color and pattern. I maintain a personal studio practice at Ambient Magic Studios in Portland, OR, working across diverse mediums to create layered, abstract landscapes informed by emotional and geographic terrain.

I explore feelings and memory through stylized topographical maps. By taking the pattern of topographical maps and repeating it through various media, scale, and color I try to make something new that still evokes the familiar. Like a musical remix, the hills and valleys become something else through layering, and I enjoy playing with the disorienting quality of layering places over each other, in a similar fashion to the feeling I get remembering an old home in a new place. Experimenting with various media helps me build a vibrant language of line and shape with the goal of making the familiar strange, and disorienting a sense of place by repeating and harmonizing patterns and colors. I use a mix of watercolor, acrylics, crayons, and masking medium to play with depth and perception.

I am a trans person who is also a transplant, someone who has had to move through landscapes and genders with their own sense of direction. The feeling of being both foreign and familiar is like vertigo, and that sense of not having your feet fully on the ground is what I aim for with the layering of landscapes, and I have started to incorporate more and more colors to try and push both the sense of disorientation and possible joy.

Making art accessible has been a lifelong passion of mine, and utilizing zines and art cards has been a huge part of that. How that shows up in this body of work is that I cut up a lot of my work after scanning it and making it part of a series of individual works that I give to friends, family, and strangers. Doing this with my landscape work allows my imaginative cartography to travel with people in a way like a shared memory.