Matheline Marmy

Lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland

Artist statement

My artistic practice is rooted in a material-based exploration, driven by investigations into environmental forms. These often involve documenting and analyzing traces, focusing on phenomena and agencies of matter. The resulting works are grown from reactive materials: water, chemicals, metallic compounds, salts, and organic elements, assembled or contained within metal structures, glass, or on porous surfaces such as textile. These materials and gestures have emerged through my personal methodology, informed by a regular studio practice and my initial background in photography. I am deeply interested in exploring networks and relationships between the artificial and natural, organic and inorganic, living and nonliving. Doing so, I engage with the versatile qualities of materials and their entanglements and aggregations with(in) human processes, using sculptural components to construct alternate scenarios. As feminist materialist Jane Bennett asks in Vibrant Matter : A Political Ecology of Things (2009) : “Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.” I thus wonder : in a world increasingly shaped by ecological instability, can we still reimagine our relationship with the inanimate? Can a close-up interaction with matter reshape our understanding of agency, and invite to reconsider a positioning? The resulting pieces...

Artwork