Maisie Cousins in conversation with Charlotte Jansen and Hannah Watson
25th April 2023
Maisie Cousins speaks to writer Charlotte Jansen and her gallerist and publisher Hannah Watson, on her new body of work which will be shown at Photo London with TJ Boulting. ‘Walking Back To Happiness’ incorporates her trademark up close and visceral images with a departure that explores AI and sculpture.
Hannah Watson is the Director of contemporary art gallery TJ Boulting and publisher Trolley Books. She joined Trolley in 2005, and co-founded the gallery TJ Boulting in Fitzrovia in 2011. TJ Boulting’s programme supports and represents emerging and mid-career contemporary artists in all mediums, including Juno Calypso, Maisie Cousins, Haley Morris-Cafiero and Poulomi Basu. It has hosted the British Journal of Photography International Award since 2015 whose winners have included Dominic Hawgood, Juno Calypso, Daniel Castro Garcia, Jack Latham, Emeric Luisset and Hajar Benjida. TJ Boulting has participated in several international art fairs including Photo London, Paris Photo, Unseen, Dallas Art Fair, NADA, Zona Maco and Art Brussels. As former chair of the trustees and now freelance curator Hannah has produced exhibitions for The Fitzrovia Chapel on Leigh Bowery, Caroline Walker, Lee Miller and Gideon Mendel’s ‘The Ward’. She is also chair of the Young Patron committee for The Photographers’ Gallery and on the board of the Artists’ Collecting Society.
Maisie Cousins (born London, 1992) studied Fine Art Photography at Brighton University, completing her BA in 2014. Her first solo show ‘grass, peonie, bum’ was held in May 2017 at TJ Boulting, London. In 2018 she had the inaugural solo show at Elephant West, London, and in 2020 she had her first international solo show at Fotografiska, Stockholm, which travelled to Estonia. She had her first solo show in Mexico at Galería Hilario Galguera, Mexico City in November 2021. She has exhibited in several international group shows including at the Vogue Photo Festival in Milan, 2016, Fotofo festival, Slovakia, 2018, the European Month of Photography Luxembourg, Musee National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg, 2019, the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Hong Kong, 2019, the Look Photo Biennial, 2019, the Bangkok Art Biennial 2020-21 and The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge in 2022. In 2019 she was one of FOAM Amsterdam’s FOAM Talents with a travelling exhibition to London and New York. In 2017 her work was published as part of a survey of female photographers ‘Girl on Girl’ edited by Charlotte Jansen (Lawrence King). She has published two artist monographs with Trolley Books ‘Squeezing One Out’ in 2018 and ‘Rubbish, Dipping Sauce, Grass, peonie, bum’ in 2019, which was a finalist for the Paris Photo Aperture First Book Award. Her work is in the permanent collection of Deutsche Börse and Women’s Art Collection. She is represented by TJ Boulting, London and Galería Hilario Galguera, Mexico City. She lives and works in St Leonards, UK.
Charlotte Jansen is a writer on contemporary art and culture and the former editor-at-large at Elephant. She is the author of two books on photography: Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze (LKP, 2017) and Photography Now (Tate/Ilex, 2021). She has contributed to the Financial Times, The Guardian, British Vogue, ELLE, Wallpaper*, Frieze, The Art Newspaper, Artsy and the British Journal of Photography, among others. She regularly write texts for books for world-class publishers, including Phaidon’s Prime (2022) and The Great Women Painters (2022) and essays for artist monographs and exhibitions. She has guest lectured at Parsons, Goldsmith’s, UWE, John Moores University, Huddersfield, Leeds, Nottingham and UAE Universities, among others, and moderated artist talks and panels at events at galleries and institutions such as Tate Modern, The Photographers’ Gallery and Art Basel. She is also the presenter of the Dior Talks podcast series on the female gaze.