Maz Dixon is a Sydney artist whose art is inspired by vintage postcards. Paintings such as Shangri-La, the winner of the 2017 Waverley Art Prize, playfully explore the colonisation of landscapes and histories by tourism.

Since completing a BFA at COFA and a Master of Studio Practice at SCA, Maz’s practice has focussed primarily on painting and its relationship with mass-produced photographic images. Taking figures and landscapes from scanned postcards, she creates a digital collage. She then projects and manually traces this digital artefact onto a surface and uses it as the basis of a painting. The transition of images from mass-produced objects to a unique work of art is a central feature Maz’s style, with the line drawing still being visible in the finished painting.

Postcards and other mementos primarily function as reminders of holidays and destinations, but they also act as instruction manuals as to how a place is to be experienced or remembered. Often a landscape is imbued with a kind of cartoonish exoticism, or a narrative of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’ is grafted onto the the holidaymakers’ experience. Such mundane myth-making serves to obscure the history and traditions of a place and its inhabitants.

Maz has completed residencies in Australia with Waverley Council, and overseas at San Cresci in Chianti and as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. She is a two-time finalist in the Sulman Prize.