Through her work Maria Pierides aims to render in colour the stories of the physical and emotional landscapes that formed her experiences of being born in Greece and then growing up in England and Cyprus and now living in Wales.

The process of her painting relates to this theme, using mixed media, to build up and scrape back areas of paint to capture the atmosphere, mass, and light of the landscapes that she is aiming to depict.

Pierides explores ways of bringing these landscapes together and plays with the similarities and contrasts: How being caught between two time perspectives (the Eastern Mediterranean and England), two different kinds of light, two different cultures, results in both a feeling of richness and diversity of experience as well as a search for rootedness in the moment and in space.