Max Tristan Watkins
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Max Tristan Watkins is an artist and writer from Canterbury in the UK. His practice draws from various historical tools of control and their absurdities. Currently, he is interested in the European early-modern book as an information technology. With a literary sensibility that favours quotation, citation, trope, and idiom, he takes pleasure in following rabbit holes and constructing webs of footnotes. At the centre of his work is the precise absence of something unarticulated, gestured towards and acted out in miniature, euphemism, or parable. His prints, paintings, and books often toy with ideas of the body double, the facsimile, or the absent original. A subject he returns to often is the disjointed, open(ed), or chimeric body - and its misrepresentations in taxonomies, anatomies, and histories.
Max received his BFA from the University of Oxford, where he was a Waugh Scholar, Stuart Morgan Prize winner, and Gibbs Prize winner. His work has been supported by the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan Research Fellowship. He is a current Tomayko Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and will be the recipient of a Maker-Creator Fellowship at Winterthur Museum in 2025.