Director's Works
Winsor & Newton, Full Spectrum Maria Lax
Maria Lax is a Finnish photographer and director based in London. Her work reflects a fascination with folklore, beliefs and the otherworldly; themes that flow effortlessly into her work.
Maria’s commercial portfolio includes collaborations with leading brands such as Apple, Channel 4, Vogue Italia, Chanel, Virgin Records, British Telecom and Samsung. Her first collaboration with Art Practice was one of the multi award winning Channel 4 idents. Entitled ‘Gathering’, the film depicts a scene of three older women meeting in a clearing in the woods, long grey hair flowing in the breeze.
Her photography has been exhibited in over 14 countries, including cities such as London, Florence, New York and Jakarta. Her most recent solo exhibition ‘The Other Crowd’ was displayed in the VB Photo Museum in Finland in 2025, which presented her work across the past decade around the theme of folklore. In 2024, a portrait of her grandfather was selected for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Photo Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Three times Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel ‘Chivo’ Lubezki contacted her personally to enlist her as the stills photographer for Alfonso Cuarón’s psychological thriller, ‘DISCLAIMER*, for Apple TV, an experience that cemented Maria’s education in film making.
In 2025, Lax was nominated for the Young Directors Award at Cannes and 'Most Promising Commercial Director' at the Creative Circle Awards. She was the winner of British Journal of Photography’s ‘Female In Focus’ award in 2019 and a finalist in the BJP Portrait of Humanity in 2020.
Lax has published two photographic books, ‘Taken by the Tide’ (Nazraeli Press, 2023) and ‘Some Kind of Heavenly Fire’ (Setanta Books, 2020), both with sold out editions, and the latter with a cult following. Her third book, ‘The Stray Sod’, was photographed in Ireland and comes out in 2026.
Director and photographer Maria Lax has collaborated with artist Daniel Eatock on ‘Full Spectrum’, a visually hypnotic short film for the iconic art materials brand Winsor & Newton. Both creatives are represented by the London-based production company and creators’ studio, Art Practice.
Conceived as a moving meditation on colour, Maria Lax places the viewer inside Eatock’s artistic process. Using macro cinematography and analogue techniques, the film transforms Winsor & Newton’s premium paints into an expressive visual language where each blend, hue, and separation becomes a narrative thread.
The film is set against a poetic voiceover by Eatock himself, guiding viewers through the evolving colourscape. Atmospheric sound design by String and Tins adds further texture to the immersive experience.
