Maya is an illustrator and visual artist based in London, primarily focusing on themes in relation to music and the culture that surrounds it, alongside looking into topics related to identity.
Music has been a fascination of hers since an early age, and is one of their main inspirations in day to day life – you can often find her in the crowd at some kind of gig, from an arena to a 100 person capacity basement room, or browsing a record store to add to their never ending music collection. Inspired by the experiences created by music – whether this be the atmosphere of a show, analysing how a musician transfers their music from sound to visual or the tactility of opening up a physical piece of music – she works to document and communicate stories and narratives through the use of print, bookwork, collage, digital mediums and textiles.
Pinz & Needlez is Maya’s grad project – an illustrated zine collecting the experiences and culture of the London alternative music scene, particularly diving into fashion and identity within these realms. This first volume features interviews from some of London’s up and coming artists Jazmin Bean, Salvia and Kelly Wang, primarily focusing on young musicians, who were brought up in a world consumed by having an online presence and a constant instantaneous exposure to digital spaces, and trying to bring that back down to living in the present. The issue also features documentations of recent gigs and collections of people’s typical concert outfits. Influenced by the underground punk zines of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, Maya wanted to curate an archive and capture the essence and memory of today’s music youth subcultures in a physical, tangible, offline format, just as the zines of those days did with subcultures such as punk and goth.
