Esther Mathieu

Lives and works in Salt Lake City, UT, USA

Artist statement

These days I am interested in liminality, I find myself slipping through in-betweens, spaces that cannot be easily made to be one thing or another. I sit by wetlands, I reach down from the boardwalk to capture mats of algae in my fingers, see how they change when I lift the living sheets off the surface of the water. I poke at mythologies and dream ways of being full of strange infrastructures, unknown urban plans. As an artist I have always been drawn to in-between places, collage and multimedia interactions that allow different worlds to come into contact. I like processes in photography that allow me to touch the image as it emerges with my hands—cyanotype chemistry blooming slowly into form. Lately, as I work through histories, design practices, and ecologies related to wetlands, I am learning to understand relationships between the human and the more-than-human, the way that wetlands are a meeting place for these entities, the way that my body and mind are a meeting place of these entities also. My work lately is exploring the space of dreaming that this time of transition opens to us, if we are willing to restructure, redesign our systems, interactions, relations, and time. I am mired in the grief of climate crisis and the hope of what comes after, can come after. I want to take things apart to understand the workings of them, draw from liminal spaces to understand nonbinary ways of putting things back together.

Artwork