Maïlys - Artist Biography

Belgian visual artist, lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Honors a master degree in Fine Arts "Sculpture" after studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium (2005).

Born in Brussels in 1983 but grew up in Overijse, a Flemish community on the southeast of the capital. Generating from an artist's family, she follows her parents, her aunts, and uncles in their footsteps when she began her artistic education in Brussels at the Sint-Lukas kunsthumaniora at the age of fifteen (1998). By this time, she started her career as a young artist with exhibitions and participated in a contest for young artists (2000). This contest drastically changed her career. As a young artist, she wanted to be an animation artist, and after this, life pushed her into the direction of visual arts. She decided to move to Antwerp, where she continued her education at the Academy of Fine Arts to become a sculptor. During these studies, she took additional classes in aggregation to become a teacher in Fine Arts. In 2005, she earned her Master's degree and was approached by several galleries. Only two months later, at the start of her career, her father died of alcoholism. His death was palpable in her later work and career evolution.

She added two bachelor years in graphic arts to her studies aggregation at the Academy of Royal Arts of Antwerp. In 2007, she stopped her studies and started promoting her work in several branches of the art scene. Besides making sculptures, she also drew the CD cover for a Belgian artist named SIOEN, and she illustrated a literal artwork 'The Reign Of Myth' by Allas The Ellendeh. In 2012, she tried out prosthetic make-up techniques, which is a combination of sculpture and special effects of cinematography.

After living in Antwerp for six years, she moves to Essen (2007), where she joins friends in a small forest community. She gains consciousness of how we can live in harmony with nature with an almost zero-impact on it. This is, for her, a dream coming true. In Antwerp, she worked as a waitress in the Moeskop for 4.5 years, and when she moved to Essen (30km north), she kept her job at the café in Antwerp. She has her workshop in Antwerp, which makes it possible to combine her part-time job at the bar with living in the countryside. In 2008, she works on wall sculptures for the bar where she worked. With the takeover of the bar by another boss, her job as a waitress ends. In the summer of 2009, the wall sculptures are hung on the outer wall of the bar and inaugurated.

In 2009, the friends-community in Essen is closed down by the authorities, which draws her back to her roots, and at the end of 2009, she moves definitively back to Brussels. She rents an apartment in the house of her godmother, who's an artisan artist making clothing in hemp & natural dyeing and plant-based printing techniques. Her godmother is a great inspiration for her together with her mom, who's a ceramic artist at that moment, and her sister, who's a professional bass guitar player.

In that time in Brussels, a new art becomes part of her life, she develops music through an African instrument she had discovered in the time she lived in the community. She takes private classes for one year followed by group classes for 6 years at Musique Publique in Brussels.

Today her art is a mixture of disciplines that melt into each other: sculpture, graphic arts, digital arts, photography, drawings, paintings... Like a Uomo universale, her lust for knowledge drives her boundaries always further into the unknown