Maybelle Peters is a London based artist and filmmaker working in film and CGI and is currently a practice-based PhD candidate at UCA Farnham. Her practice focuses on storytelling using documentary, historical events, literature and oral narratives. She gained her BA in Animation at Farnham where she made her first commissioned film for BBC2. Her Channel 4 commissioned film, Mama Lou, has been shown extensively at animation festivals including Annecy, Ottawa and the Edinburgh Film Festival as well as broadcast television. She is the recipient of the inaugural Womxn of Colour art award and her work was shown as part of the exhibition, The Place is Here (Nottingham Contemporary and South London Gallery, 2017).
Maybelle is the Decolonising Archives: Digital Artist in Residence 2021, an initiative developed by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute in partnership with iniva, focused critically and creatively on a specific aspect of iniva’s digital materials and online archive. Maybelle’s research during her remote residency at the Stuart Hall Library titled “Uncannily Familiar” examines the digital spaces operating between the familiar and unfamiliar black body in an archive. The metadata existing within the digitised information held in the archive is (re)visited foregrounding acts of mapping processes. She aims to look at how bodies move and are moved by blackness. The project draws on extensive readings of the uncanny including texts by Ernst Jentsch (1906) and Sigmund Freud (1919), together with Masahiro Mori’s contested findings revealed in his ‘Uncanny Valley’ study. The unfamiliar as otherness and alterity are, as Edouard Glissant (2010) seeks to (un)map, an act against a determining logic of recognition.”