Maia Rakovic (b. 2000) is a Scottish-Croatian artist who uses the painted image to depict chimeric monsters, those who blur the line between woman and other. Her works seek to challenge hierarchical modes of social cognition, questioning our perceptions of beauty and otherness. Is there a form where these can intersect?

With a background in influencer marketing, Rakovic is well aware of the visual image’s ability to enchant, speak, and sell. The female body is the focal point of this fast new economy – of attention, acceptability, and capital.

Central to her practice is the feminist subject of the monstrous body – humans who bare their teeth, unfurl their wings, and disrupt the spaces they occupy. Influenced by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s theories of monstrosity, Rakovic’s figures are found in domestic environments, cities, and invented realities, defined by their inability to blend into their surroundings.

Rakovic’s process is theory-led. She conjures hybridised symbols in order to explore the limits of tolerance for the other. Working with found, scrap fabrics and a mixed-media painting practice, she allows the work to be part of its immediate surroundings, born of its socio-temporal context.

As the rights of transgender people in the UK are further attacked, Rakovic feels a sense of urgency in her work. The body has never been more scrutinised on an individual, interpersonal, and societal scale. In this regressive cultural miasma, the bodies of both women and genderqueer people are threatened by pathologisation and discrimination.

Through a blend of self-portraiture and intuitive mark-marking, Rakovic’s work challenges categorisation. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Jenny Saville, Tracey Emin, and Carolee Schneemann, Rakovic engages with Queer and Feminist theories of art and space – theory that barks and growls. Disrupting hostile societal architectures and hierarchies, Rakovic’s work extends an invitation for connection, community, and empathy with the monstrous.