Elida Maiques is a Wicklow-based artist with roots in Guatemala and Spain. Her work, often in collaboration with different groups, has been exhibited in museums and art centres like CentroCentro Cibeles, Madrid (Spain), IVAM (Valencian Museum of Modern Art), València (Spain) and others. She has a background in drawing and has edited award-winning publications as member of Polen (Spain) and Stray Lines (Ireland).
She continues to explore the boundaries of comics with other disciplines such as dance and music. In 2015, a series of botanical drawings became her long-term project I Am a Forest. It now involves seed-gathering, tree propagation and wildlife/art workshops with her local school and other communities.
Maiques sees in these commoning practices real collective thought and action eroding the assigned places (gender, class, age…). In 2021 I Am a Forest focused prominently on birdsong, music anthropology and archaeology. It became a non-hierarchical forest performance by professional musicians and others. The filmed performance was edited into a short film, which premiered in 2022 in the International Film Festival of Morelia (Mexico).
Since 2022 she is the Seed Librarian of Bray Library and joined the Mermaid Arts Centre as Associate Artist.