Maya Ramsay is an award-winning artist, curator and writer. For over 20 years her work has focussed on the subjects of conflict, migration and the climate emergency.
She works with politically and historically important sites, employing a variety of processes to capture visual histories that would otherwise be lost or unseen. These include drawing, film, photography, sculpture and a process which she developed in 1997 to lift surfaces from the built environment.
Ramsay’s projects range from making work from the walls of the derelict buildings at Bletchley Park where the Code-breakers worked in WW11, to working with the unidentified graves and shipwrecked boats of migrants who died at sea whilst trying to reach Europe.
Recent exhibitions of her work include ‘Ashes to Ashes’, Migration Museum, London, 2023; ‘SHIM Social Justice’, Miami Art Week, USA, 2022 and the ‘World Conference on Statelessness’, The Hague, Netherlands, 2019. Her work features in ’50 WOMEN SCULPTORS’ (Aurora Metro Publishing, 2020).
Ramsay co-curated the highly acclaimed ‘Sink Without Trace’ exhibition on migrant deaths at sea at P21 Gallery, London in 2019. Her recent articles include ‘The Unimaginable, the Unthinkable and the Unknown’ in The Work of Art in the Age of Planetary Destruction, (CUSSH, 2023) and ‘Assessing the Impact of Art in Relation to Migrant Deaths at Sea’ in the ‘Encyclopaedia of Global Migration: New Mobilities and Artivism’ (Edward Elgar, 2023). Ramsay studied a BA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art (1994) and MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art (1998).
instagram: @mayaramsayart
SEAS - South East Artists 