MOODY AF
Interview by: Jennie Bull
Photos by: Amelie Trimpl
Photos by: Amelie Trimpl
Maia del Estal (b. Argentina, 1993) is a self-taught painter, poet, performance artist, and Ikebana practitioner based in Brooklyn.
She grew up in an extended family of artists, actors, and political dissidents, shaped by the vibrant queer counterculture of Buenos Aires.
Immersed in drawing workshops and poetry readings from an early age, she began painting large-scale abstract works on found objects, experimenting with different supports and unconventional materials. Since then, she has participated in various group shows and solo exhibitions.
In 2015, she integrated Ikebana into her practice as a method of emotional balance. After relocating to New York in 2017, Maia expanded her work to include performance, text-based videos, and sound installations, blending visual art with explorations of poetry, the body, and electronic music.
Moody sat down with the artist in her Ridgewood studio, see the full interview below.
MAIA: My relationship with myself changed when I started making fun of my own darkness, and making art with my pain. I’ve navigated some very chaotic inner landscapes— LOL
But art forces you to work with your inner shadows: not avoiding the wound but creating from it.
JB: Why are you Moody AF?
MAIA: I experience intense opposite emotions at the same time. I always describe it as a tornado of moods. A constant feeling in between being in love, horny and heart broken.
The same way is my creative process: I go from a painting to a poem to a video-performance to a sound.
MAIA: Growing up in Argentina was inspiring and intense. Both of my parents were in the theater scene, so I was raised inside a wild, artistic house—full of chaos and creativity. Buenos Aires has this subversive underground energy. it’s raw, queer, sexually open, I guess that’s what kind of became my BFA in the arts.
I’m a self-taught artist, but I’ve been in the studios since I was five—my mom’s best friend was a painter, and I spent years in her studio painting with her.
JB: You have a background as a florist, working with floral elements and Ikebana, how do you marry all of your mediums while creating?
MAIA: I started arranging flowers like a painter—through texture, color, and shape. I approached it with the same instinctive urge I feel when painting. Then it became a sort of ritual, a meditative exercise, A grounding experience after the chaos of painting and performance.
Working with ephemeral materials is like painting with death and life. Helps me to rebalance my emotions. Embrace silence, presence and absence.
MAIA: Yes, many times I felt sexualized, stereotyped, reduced to a fantasy. But I’m not here trying to be your fantasy. I’m here to fuck the fantasy up.
My work is about reclaiming power that’s been taken. About eroticism as something deeper than sex—as resistance and life source.
I took it back by being louder and confident. I don’t wanna be consumed, I wanna be heard. I gave up trying to teach men a long time ago. Everything I do, I do it for the girls. That’s how you flip the script.
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JB: How have you used your work to empower yourself and others?
MAIA: Using the strength from fragility, embracing my vulnerability.
Being unapologetically open. —
GO DEEP
TO bring self-reflection.
AND CREATE a shared state of awareness—
Speak your annoying truth.
Make people uncomfortable.
And never be sorry for being intense.
JB: Your upcoming show is titled ‘Romantic Hoe’, what does being a romantic hoe mean to you?
MAIA: Being a romantic hoe is being fierce, empowered, bold, rebellious, is a radical vulnerability. A radical honesty. wild, messy, passionate. Is being a slut without shame, is being deeply in love without shame.
Is freedom. Is a life-style. is how you carry yourself.
Liberation means I don’t need to be saved. I don’t need to be protected.
I’m sexually intellectually, financially and emotionally independent,
I’m my own boss
I’m my own sugar daddy.
I'm the pimp and the hoe.
JB: How do you balance demonic and animalistic themes in your art?
MAIA: One time I wrote ‘hang out with your demons but never fall in love with them’. I work with the demonic not as an external entity but as a facet of the self —I try to embody them, a submission not in weakness but in strength. It’s sort of a ritual that you go in and out to get something out of it.
And the animalistic always has to be somehow there for me. Is the ‘grotesque’ of the human nature.
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MAIA: Cancer to me is divine feminine energy— sexual, emotional, empathic, DEEP, intuitive, wet. The mother. The moon. The mystery, the soft, the dangerous.
JB: What gets you in the mood?
MAIA: The moon, techno and sex.
To support Maia, subscribe to her ‘Private Archive’ on her website to find more about her practice and upcoming exhibitions.
For more Maia, visit www.maiadelestal.com / @ghost.cow
Over dose
Over pressure
Over acting
Over whelming
Over dramatized
Over exposure
Over sharing
Over emotional
Over abstract
Over intensity
Over sleep
Over enamored
Over done
Over come
Over paint
Over you’
1 00 x 80in