Danica Maier
Danica Maier (PhD) is a USA/UK artist and part-time Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She has supported practice-based PhD researchers for over 10 years and is a UKCGE Recognised Supervisor. Her practice-based artistic research explores materially embedded making and the slippages and possibilities of translation between drawing, textiles, and text.
Maier’s work moves between drawing, textiles, text, installation and archival material, exploring how meaning, perception and knowledge can shift through processes of making, translating, repeating and looking. She is interested in the relationships between materials, ideas and ways of seeing, often using processes of return and repetition to reveal difference and generate new possibilities. Her approach is informed by Wittgenstein’s concept of aspect seeing and by slow, attentive engagement, with the ‘unrepeating-repeat’. Working with archives and collections is an important starting point of her artistic enquiry.
Maier has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally, including at Nottingham Contemporary, Houghton Hall Music Festival and the Research Pavilion, Venice. Her artistic research has been published in the Journal of Artistic Research and others. She is a qualified mentor and coach, with listening, attentiveness and dialogue central to her approach to advising students.
Current Research
Danica Maier’s current creative research explores how making can become a way of thinking, and how changes in material, process and attention can produce new ways of seeing and understanding. Her art practice moves between drawing, textiles, text, site-specific work and archival material, often using translation between material forms as a means of generating unexpected relationships and possibilities.
She is particularly interested in repetition and variation, and in how repeated actions or processes can create difference rather than sameness. Her concept of the ‘unrepeating-repeat’ has developed through this enquiry, exploring how subtle shifts within repetition can sustain attention and invite audiences to look again.
Maier is interested in shifting perspectives and in the embodied moments through which we suddenly see, understand or experience something differently. She explores how sustained attention, material encounters and changes in viewpoint can create moments of discovery, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar or a new aspect comes into view. Archives and collections provide another important context for this enquiry, alongside questions of how artists can work with historical processes, materials and knowledge without simply reproducing them.
She is particularly interested in practice-based artistic research where methodologies emerge through making, and in supporting researchers to develop their own ways of working, particularly across disciplinary or material boundaries. Her supervisory approach is grounded in listening, dialogue and careful attention to the particular questions, materials and possibilities emerging within each researcher’s practice.
Advisor: PhD and MFA