Named Artit’s Jury Selection Floral Artist of the Year 2024, Maggie Shafran reimagines Dutch still lifes through disassembly, reconstruction, and close visual study. The Fragments series is rooted in a deep fascination with impermanence, preservation, and emotional tension—where classical forms meet contemporary questions. Through drawing, stitching, and re-contextualisation, the work invites prolonged looking and offers a quiet meditation on memory, time, and the layered nature of beauty. Trained observation, material experimentation, and symbolic intimacy come together to build a visual language that lingers in the space between presence and absence.

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Your Fragments series reinterprets Dutch flower paintings through fragmentation and reconstruction. What first drew you to these historic works, and how did your relationship with them evolve during the process? 

I was initially drawn to these works because anytime I walked into a room in a museum, I found myself gravitating towards the still lifes. Something about the smallness of them pulled me in, and once I got close, I was fascinated by the even smaller worlds that existed within them. There was a duality between the hyperrealism and an almost surreal quality that intrigued me. Reality and unreality reside together in one painting. Thematically, I loved how something beautiful could point to something morbid. That something can contain and evoke such disparate emotions has always felt relevant to how I view the world. Nothing is ever just one thing, and the closer you look, the more you find. The technique also blew me away. As I got to know Jan van Huysum's work better and studied it more closely, I saw how his brushwork was almost invisible, and very little indicated that what you were looking at was paint. There was a transparency and fullness at the same time. The more time I spent deeply studying these works, the more character they took on for me. There were fully expansive worlds that existed within each painting, and listening to books on tape as I worked made them feel even more alive as stories swirled around in my head. The putti took on personalities, and petals or veins became landscapes on which I projected scenes. When I see one of these works in a museum now, they are more something to be explored rather than seen as a whole, made up of fragments. Especially because so often a leaf or flower will be almost the exact same as one from another one of his paintings. I think I could pick one of his water droplets out of a lineup. It almost feels as though he is cutting and pasting to create different bouquets. Which isn’t too dissimilar from how he would have composed his paintings. They would be an amalgamation of studies he would do over the seasons, and it was a common technique to work from previous paintings, in addition to those studies. I feel a strange connection to him through my deep visual study of his process.

Much of your work deals with preserving the ephemeral—memories, moments, relationships. What role does still life, and particularly florals, play in your exploration of mortality and time?

Floral still life is a great, classic example of art that deals with mortality, it has this amazing quality of indicating the passage of time in a still image. In a single Van Huysum painting, you can see all the different elements of life cycles. Contained in a single “moment,” you see a bud not yet blossomed and rotting fruit being devoured by insects, it can keep something hovering at the point of decay, or just on the other side of it. Still, life works to, in a way, preserve a fixed moment, a flower at the height of its beauty, but it also reminds us that nothing is so permanent in real life. That knowledge that the flowers depicted are long gone is always lurking at the edges. In a lot of my work I aim to hang on to something and present it in a way that is consumable to a viewer long after the moment has passed. Flowers evoke in me a kind of frenzy, a burst of joy and excitement that is so quickly followed by a sadness that they will not last. There is something very visceral and a little intense about experiencing flowers, particularly in nature, as they bloom with the seasons. And then there is this human response or urge to cut them and bring them inside the house, to keep them in water and extend their life and beauty, but doing so is necessarily destructive. A flower in a vase might be at the height of its beauty, and you can experience it at a closer distance, but it is already dying. There is no avoiding that reality. Painting these cut flowers is a more extreme way of trying to make them last, but looking at a painting of a flower doesn’t feel the same as looking at a real one. I feel like what I am seeing instead is what the artist experienced, I can feel the desire to both preserve something fleeting and create something new, all while reminding us that reality doesn’t work that way. They can create these made-up moments where flowers that bloom in different seasons are placed next to each other, interacting with each other in a way that looks so natural, but isn’t. The artist gets to kind of play god with what is possible and bend the rules of time and mortality, but only in the world of the painting. In the end, reality has to be experienced and can’t be distilled. I think what I’m interested in in my Fragments series is the experience of the artist. I’m examining their work, an inanimate object that imitates life, rather than life itself.

You’ve described drawing as “active viewing.” Can you talk about what this process looks like for you and how it becomes a way of embodying or metabolising an image? 

Something that always makes a work come alive, to me, is how viewers interact with it. On it's own it isn’t full of life - it's an inanimate object - but when we give it our attention, when we look for symbols, or beauty, or the hand of the artist, the viewer glimpses something that the artist put there and that connection between artist and viewer is what feels electric to me. There is tremendous value in the process of making for the artist, but there is a sort of magic in what it can become under the gaze of another. What the viewer brings to the work is their own experiences and interpretations that are completely out of the artist's control, and I find that fascinating. For me, the process of active viewing is sort of a way of translating my experience of the painting. My voracious desire to consume an image visually and then express that devouring and hunger through mechanical motion. It’s interesting to use the word metabolize because I do think of viewing as a sense of consuming and processing through the body and using what you take in to energize and create motion or action in a similar way that one uses food. I feel connected to the painter because we both used our hands to make the same lines and shapes, even if the technique would be very different, there is that connection. I feel like I’m studying him as much as I am his work. 

Your use of stitching and fragmentation in Fragments evokes both intimacy and rupture. How do these gestures mirror the emotional or conceptual ideas at the heart of the work? 

I think the gesture, being both gentle and slightly violent, mirrors the way that there are often opposing sides contained in one thing, which is something that still life does really well. There is beauty and decay, beginnings and endings. And I think that tension and coexistence of opposites is something that is central to my work. The stitches evoke a sort of intimate and domestic act of bringing together, or repair, but at the same time, the piercing of the paper can arouse concern or discomfort, a feeling that it might rip the work apart rather than hold it together. I’ve always been interested in duality in myself, I often feel a lot of conflicting thoughts, opinions, or emotions, and sometimes have a hard time reconciling these within myself. Making artwork that tries to fit what could be considered opposites into a single piece reminds me that duality is something natural and to be embraced, that there is a power and a wholeness in it. We all contain multitudes, so it makes sense that art would too. I think also, intimacy and vulnerability, which could be associated with weakness, actually require a lot of strength, and it's important to remember that there is always more under the surface. Pretty much everything is more than it appears.

You draw from a wide range of references—from classic painting and portraiture to contemporary literature. How do these threads come together in your practice, and what guides your interdisciplinary approach? 

My interests are sometimes scattered and disconnected. There is a wide range of aesthetic and material approaches in my work, but there is commonality and shared meaning throughout my practice. I’m easily distracted and intrigued by lots of different things, but, at the very least, the thing they all have in common is that I am drawn to them. So, sometimes, understanding what ties them together takes a bit of self-reflection. I think one of the best skills I’ve learned as an artist is to let myself be led by my own curiosity and to test the different ways I can make work that reflects those interests. If I keep coming back to the same types of images or things, it's important to ask myself why and see where that question can take me. My process often begins with that urge to preserve, which manifests in the form of collecting. When it comes to objects, moments, people, etc, I take photographs—lots and lots of photographs, usually not particularly good ones. But anytime I think, oh, ‘I don’t want to forget that’, ‘that's cool’, or ‘I want to take this with me’, I take a picture, just to have it. I then spend a lot of time organizing those images into folders, thinking about what it was that sparked my curiosity and pushed me to want to save them. Some common themes that come up for me will be things like the everyday, temporality, duality, florals, decay, and fragility. I also like to store writing and research too. I’ve got a massive Google Doc with research into lots of different artists, quotes from books or museum texts, my own thoughts, and reflections. I’ve not got the best memory, so it helps to have it all in one place, and I so when I’m grasping to remember something, I can search within the doc for keywords. Not everything I collect ends up becoming part of a series or being incorporated into the work directly, but all of it teaches me something about myself, and I never know when I might come back around to something I would have otherwise forgotten. Eventually, I’ll notice when something keeps coming up, and I try to go with that instinct and narrow my focus to delve further into a recurring theme. From there, I’ll start experimenting with different methods and ideally develop a series once I feel like I’ve grasped the right material approach.  There’s a powerful interplay in your work between beauty and decay, wholeness and disintegration. Is that tension something you consciously seek out, or does it emerge intuitively through your making? 

I don’t think it was initially something I consciously sought out. But looking back on a lot of the work I’ve been making, it started to become clear that there was consistently a sense of duality present in the work. Noticing it gave me space to reflect on my frequent internal struggles and shifts. I’ve never been particularly decisive and find myself intrigued by a variety of seemingly contradictory tastes. Some days I love colour and excess; other times I crave simplicity and calm. I think I am constantly seeking a balance and swirling around between extremes. So I guess it's just a part of my personality. I think it's maybe that I don’t really see beauty and decay as opposites and think there is as much harmony as there is tension in their coexistence. Flowers represent that feeling of a burst of beauty, something so intricate and delicate that one can’t help but stop in their tracks to admire it. But I also love it when something is so well-loved that it's become ugly, worn out, or even creepy. Both have a uniqueness - flowers are intricate, no two are identical, and they have the intrigue of being temporary and in motion, up towards bloom and down towards decay and disappearance. Well-aged objects have stood the test of time, becoming more unique as they are handled, loved, discarded, and rediscovered. Old things have an accumulation of life that may appear to decay, but has a real longevity to it. Flowers have a sense of life as things about to burst, that perfect bubble that you know is going to pop. Your love of its beauty is always tainted with your fear of its passing. These two approaches to viewing time and life have a similar, frantic, frenzied pull to me. I think it makes sense that my work reflects these themes because I am drawn to how duality and tension heighten each end of the spectrum, making both more urgent and present.

Narrative, memory, and emotion are present throughout your work, even in pieces that appear abstracted or fragmented. How important is storytelling—visually or conceptually—to your creative process, and what do you hope your viewers take away from it? 

I love stories. In a way, I try to tell or hint at a story with my work, but there is only so much control an artist has over how their work is interpreted. For me, I am constantly seeking out stories and narratives in the images and objects I work with. I think about the history of something, where it came from, the people who interacted with it, where their lives took them, and in the case of objects, how those lives impacted the very surface of it and how those impressions can tell a story. There is a kind of index of human existence present around an object. I don’t always know if those impressions translate, but I think a lot about them. I remember once reading about how still life didn’t have a narrative. It might not be the way a history painting does, but I think the things we surround ourselves with very much tell a story of what is important to us. We can discern a lot about what people value or how they lived by looking at what they painted and the scenes set in a still life. It might not have a grand story arc, but it has a sense of lives being lived, and I’m always interested in that type of story. In my Fragments series, I try to use reframing to create a small narrative by showing a certain area attention. Focusing on an area and scaling it up makes it feel important, worth taking note of. I like to think about what's happening in that little section, maybe the putti become little mischievous imps, and rather than being decorative, inanimate objects, they become the subjects of a faerie story. Even if the story has no narrative, perhaps looking closely at the elements of decay alongside something like a nest of eggs tells a more basic story of how we are born, bloom bright, and then die. I think what inspires me to think of these little scenes and non-human objects as having stories, is because I am constantly listening to books on tape as I work, and those stories always permeate the work for me. It helps bring the work into the greater story of life, what motivates us humans, the stories we tell ourselves, and the ones we tell each other. I’ve recently started using quotes from those books as titles for the work, which I hope helps the viewer feel a little of what I did while making the work. Because I know that, in the end, the stories I see and feel when making and looking at the work will always differ from those a viewer might see. They will always bring their own perspective to the work, and I think that is a key element in art; there is always a back and forth between the artist, the work, and the viewer. I think being viewed is what brings the work to life.

How has your relationship with the floral genre changed since beginning Fragments? Do flowers still carry the same symbolic or emotional weight for you as they did at the beginning of the series? 

It’s interesting, I think I now approach paintings in galleries with a slightly more critical eye than I might have before. I look really closely at the different techniques and styles. Initially, I don’t think I put as much symbolic weight on them as I do now, I just liked them - and do be fair, I definitely still do.. My house is literally full of them; I can’t help myself when I see one at a flea market. If anything, they have become something I feel the need to collect. Literally, if I can, but also as photographs. Where I might have once simply looked at them, now that they have become a much bigger part of my practice, I feel the need to store them, to have access to them later, just in case. That goes for paintings of flowers and real flowers. It's added a bit of pressure to my enjoyment. But it's also added a level of fun to the way I encounter and look at them. I can project a sort of sadness or even cheekiness in the way a petal droops or flourishes. And I often look for and create little stories in my head of either what's going on up close, or what was going on in the lives of the people who made them. I imagine what it would feel like to draw them, what areas I would want to highlight. There's a sort of understanding I feel, a kind of connection to the people who made these pieces and a connection to the process of creating. Particularly with the Van Huysum ones, I get a strong sense of how much time and energy they take to create.

You work across a wide range of mediums—from oils to casting and collage. What informs your choice of material for a given idea or series? Is there a process of experimentation before settling into a form? 

There’s definitely a process of exploration. Almost everything for me starts with some form of documentation, usually photography, and I think that ends up being a bit of an underlying connective tissue to all of my very different bodies of work because they begin with that sort of process of preservation, collection, and categorization. I’ll then think about what it was that drew me to these different things and what processes would best represent how I feel about them. In the casting series, I initially noticed my frenzied desire to keep and record every moment of floral beauty. It reminded me of that feeling of cute aggression, technically called dimorphous expression. The urge to hold something so close you might destroy it. I did some reading about photography by Roland Barthes and how photography was destructive to the original. I saw this connection between preservation and destruction, which led me to experiment with other methods of preservation and eventually plaster casting. It fit really well conceptually for me because it was, in a sense, a 1-1 copy, but it was more of a death shroud, and one that literally, physically destroyed the original, rather than conceptually. I also just love painting and drawing, and so working in those mediums is often where I might start. I find painting has a fullness to it, with unseen depths and layers that are present but not as visible as the surface. Whereas for me, drawing can have an impenetrable quality, it encourages the eye to look at each element with almost equal weight because the treatment of the surface is incredibly similar throughout. It's like your eye slips over the surface, always finding new things to delight in, with each square inch as important as any other. I try to take into account how these qualities can inform the viewer of my intentions. I like to combine a conceptual and materials-based approach and allow them to inform each other as I play around with different methods. The first piece in the Fragments series was a stand-alone piece, which was a copy of a whole Van Huysum painting, and it was about 6 feet tall. I knew I wanted to start with them separated and then find a way to bring them together once I finished all the drawing. When I did, I made a copy of each printed on the same type of paper and spent a good deal of time testing different ways. I mixed them all up, I looked at them framed separately, I stapled them together, and a bunch of other stuff, eventually landing on the stitching, and it just felt and looked right. I do the experimentation so that, ideally, it will feel right in the making and also visually communicate the feeling or sense that I am trying to convey.

Looking ahead, what areas—whether conceptually or materially—are you interested in exploring next? Are there lingering questions from Fragments you feel compelled to revisit or expand on?

I have a few things I'm excited to keep exploring! There are definitely some lingering questions from Fragments, and it's a series I would like to keep working on. I had just begun playing with irregularly shaped borders and splicing images, and those are avenues I would like to go down to see where they might lead. I also already have plans for another piece, where I will be collaborating with a friend who specializes in traditional wood carving. We had a trip to the National Gallery together to see some of Jan van Huysum’s work in person, and he is going to create a frame for a new drawing I am just starting. I have also already returned to painting. I was working on a series during my master’s using images of objects I found in my family's basement that belonged to my late mother’s family. I’ve come back to it now with a particular focus on a set of silver flower trays. They seem to embody several of the themes I enjoy investigating. They share a visual similarity with my Little Pieces of Death series, where I created plaster casts of real flowers, and also align with themes of memory and preservation. I’m also always interested in the different ways artists replicate nature and how I can add my own spin, thinking about the layers of separation between my work and the original, natural object, with another artist's interpretation in the middle. I particularly like their reflective quality and how their surface is marked not only by their use by members of my family who have passed, but also by my own reflection. At the moment, I am in the early stages, exploring them as paintings, playing with different surfaces and styles, and I look forward to seeing where the work takes me.

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At the intersection of decay and devotion, Maggie Shafran’s practice becomes a site for holding contradiction: softness and rupture, elegance and erosion, stillness and motion. The floral still life becomes a mirror—reflecting what remains, what disappears, and what transforms in the act of looking. Each piece in the Fragments series carries the weight of observation and the urgency of remembrance. Through sustained inquiry and tactile process, the work opens a dialogue between artist, object, and viewer—one that honors fragility without trying to fix it.