Maya Hall de Bueno is an artist and animator based in Scotland. In 2025, she graduated from Glasgow School of Art and was selected for RSA New Contemporaries, the VAS Graduate Award and nominated for the Saltspace Residency Award. Informed by speculative fiction and surrealist literature, she creates stop-motion animations and audiovisual installations that explore ecofeminist ideas through non-linear storytelling.

 

Developed from her studio, situated in a disused office building provided by Outer Spaces, Maya’s work draws upon the physical conditions of her surroundings and reflects on where the boundaries between urban rigidity and the organic chaos of the natural world might dissipate. She returns to moments where plants emerge through cracks in pavements and tiny ecosystems quietly thrive within urban environments. What feels solid and permanent in modern human civilisation is treated as delicate and fluid, as she considers humanity’s place as another animal species, existing under a guise of separation from the natural world built on imposed structure and symbolism. Maya’s new work considers cities as complex ecosystems designed for human life, filled with embedded instructions that tell us how to live, where to eat and where to shelter. This work emerges from long-standing, often depicted tensions between the urban and the natural, two seemingly distinct yet persistently entwined worlds.