Where Visual Art Meets Science: The Inner Workings of Maeva Var
Visual artist and emerging director Maeva Var leans into grotesque and surreal imagery to explore complexities in human psychology, a field she understands deeply. Currently, Var is pursuing a degree in medicine to gain technical knowledge of emotional processes and functions.
“For me, art is not simply about creating something beautiful. It is a way of exploring things that are difficult to understand, express or say out loud,” explained Var. She hopes to use science adjoined with her art to dissect these more challenging aspects of personal experience.
As a teenager, health issues forced Var to stop training as an aerial gymnast, a vocation she’d worked toward professionally from age six. “I suddenly found myself without the thing that had defined me for most of my life, and I had no idea who I was without it,” she said. Var spent years feeling purposeless until her mom gave her a Canon EOS 1100D. The camera unexpectedly sparked a curiosity to express her perspective through photographs.
“I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to explore emotions and talk about things people often leave unsaid,” she said.
Var prefers to keep certain aspects of her identity private. “To me, people are people first, and I want my work to be judged by what it communicates rather than by my age, where I come from or what others expect me to be.” While she shares that she grew up in Eastern Europe, her exact location and age intentionally remain undisclosed.
“In many ways, my creative journey has been a story of losing one identity after another until I finally began creating my own.”
Her latest project, “Jane and Jill,” is a photo series that explores two sides of the same person. In the photographs, two girls’ faces are obscured by expressive masks Var crafted herself. The masks represent the two worlds we each carry: the external face others see, and the internal landscape of feeling and thought.
“I want people to see the mask and imagine being in the character’s place,” Var said. “I think this can help anyone going through something difficult to remember that they are not alone.”
Mask work is a method Var uses to externalize the vacillating, wide-ranging emotions she seeks to understand through her work as an artist and student of medicine. Wearing the drama of an internal emotional landscape on one’s face provides visibility and a voice to the unseen reality of feeling and subjective experience.
“Perhaps it is precisely at the intersection of these two perspectives — biology and human experience — that much of my art comes from,” she said.
“You can free yourself from the power the past has over you, but not necessarily from the past itself.”
“Jane and Jill” is accompanied by a soundtrack created and produced by The Silver Veils. Var met Brandon, the artist behind The Silver Veils, on Instagram. Since then, he has become a major supporter of and collaborator on her projects.
“Brandon looks at my work with fresh eyes and gives me an honest opinion. I really love what he creates,” Var said. “I sometimes feel like he understands me better than I do.”
As Var now seeks to pivot deeper into filmmaking, she wants music to continue occupying a central role. For her, motion visuals feel like a natural progression from photography. She has already shot and produced her first short film, “Jealousy,” which centers around a girl grappling with her negative and destructive inner monologue following a traumatic event. In medicine, traumatic memory is a condition where an experience continues to affect a person’s emotions, reactions and perception long-term.
“It’s a condition you can never get rid of completely. You can control it, but it will always be with you,” she said. “I want people to see that you can have this demon, but you just don’t need to listen to him.”
Var’s creative ethos is communicated through visual language that encourages imagination of sound, music and stories. By beginning with emotions, Var imagines how the concept of that inner-world experience can translate into visual language. “I use dark, surreal and strange,” she explained. “I use imagery, along with music, masks, lights and sound, to create an atmosphere.”
Some of her biggest influences are singer-songwriter Melanie Martinez and neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. “Melanie Martinez taught me that you don’t have to create something that everyone will like. What matters most is that you generally love what you create — the right people and like-minded people will find it,” she said. As for Sacks, she credits him for her interest in human psychology and neuroscience, which has become a part of her artistic language.
“I think being a woman in a creative field can sometimes be difficult, because people drag you down or don’t take your dream seriously. I have experienced this many times, but with time, I’ve learned not to internalize these opinions.”
Var has yet to commit to her next project. Apart from balancing her art with school, she operates more by intuition than a plan.
Part of navigating her creative output by intuition means trying new things as they grow appealing. “Don’t be afraid to open new doors and try something new,” she said. “You just need to keep looking. I believe we should keep opening the next door until we find the one where we feel good.”