About Maya Hartwell

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Maya Hartwell

Austin, Texas

Maya Hartwell · Austin, Texas

About

I write from a workbench,
not a studio.

I didn't come to resin through art. I came through chemistry — and more precisely, through a mildly embarrassing attempt to repair a broken piece of furniture that ended with my kitchen table covered in the wrong kind of epoxy and a curing time I had wildly miscalculated.

That was 2020, in a rented flat in London. By 2021 I had filled three shelves with finished pieces, ruined two mixing cups, and developed what I can only describe as a precise and slightly excessive interest in why resin does what it does at every stage of the curing process.

What I found, when I started looking for proper instruction, was that most beginner resources told you what to do but not why. They gave you the recipe without explaining the chemistry behind it. That gap — between "follow these steps" and "understand what's happening" — is where most beginners get stuck. A sticky surface, a cloudy finish, bubbles that won't go away. These aren't bad luck. They're physics. And once you understand the physics, they stop happening.

I moved to Austin in 2022 for the garage space. The studio there is where all three books were tested, photographed, and written. Everything in the books has been done on that workbench — wrong first, then right, then documented.

The three-book series is the instruction I wished had existed when I started: technical without being academic, precise without being cold, and always tested before it appeared on a page.

Timeline

The series