About

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Maísa Stolz is a Brazilian sculptor based in Oxfordshire, UK. Her practice transforms discarded paper into contemporary sculpture, exploring the relationship between material, memory and presence.

Working with newspapers, egg boxes and other overlooked paper materials, she builds surfaces and forms through slow, tactile processes of breaking down, layering, pressing and shaping. What begins as an ordinary material becomes a sculptural language of texture, movement and permanence.

For over fifteen years, Stolz developed a detailed figurative practice using paper as a sculptural medium. Her current body of work, Rivers: mapped or not, marks a shift towards abstraction, where the material itself becomes the subject.

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Statement

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I work with what was meant to disappear.

Discarded paper interests me because it is never truly empty. Newspapers, packaging and egg boxes carry traces of ordinary life before they arrive in the studio. They have held information, routine, labour, consumption and time.

Through a slow process of breaking down and rebuilding, I transform these materials into sculptural surfaces and forms. The work is not about recycling as an end in itself. It is about transformation, memory and the possibility of presence within matter.

My earlier work was rooted in figuration, where paper became animal, skin, muscle and gesture. Over time, the material itself began to ask for more space. I became less interested in representation and more interested in what the surface could hold.

Rivers: mapped or not is the beginning of this new phase. The works are not maps and they are not landscapes. They are traces of movement, pressure and time. They suggest rivers, but also the uncertainty of paths, borders, erosion and memory.

I am drawn to the moment when something ordinary becomes difficult to name. When discarded paper no longer behaves like paper. When the material becomes quiet, physical and present.

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Material Beginnings

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Stolz’s relationship with paper began while teaching art in Brazil, working with children, adults with mental health difficulties, people recovering from drug addiction and communities with limited resources.

Paper was accessible, inexpensive and familiar. It did not require traditional sculptural tools or materials, yet it soon revealed itself as something much more complex: light, strong, resistant and deeply expressive.

This discovery continued through her final university project, a performance involving a large-scale paper pig carried through the city. The work needed to be both light and durable, and paper made that possible.

From that point, Stolz moved away from traditional sculptural materials such as wood, stone and metal, and began to develop paper as her primary sculptural language.