Summary
Forest, trees, girl is an ongoing inquiry including painting, collage and video that considers ideas of the self, what is hidden, what is seen, in particular as it relates to depictions of femininity and female identity. An attempt to tell (as Svetlana Boym puts it ) “[the] unpredictable stories of contacts and disconnects, to play with fictional illusions and masks, to be honest with ourselves and our ghosts.”
Description
PornGirl/EarthMother, 2021
PornGirl/EarthMother is a series of monumental female figures composed of two collaged images: A black and white porn image with the central figure excised and a highly saturated image of the deep woods. Contrasting the black and white porn imagery with the dayglo colour of the woods I want to create an image that stays on your retina, that condenses a complex idea into something simpler. What is the exchange value we put on nature? That we put on our bodies? The porn context confronts our culpability, our ‘gaze’, as we passively ‘witness’ the annihilation of the planet. PornGirl/EarthMother attempts to reclaim the female form from the exploitative context of porn to create a mythic figure of power, mystery and threat.
Forest, trees, girl, 2020
Forest, trees, girl, 2020, is a 3d collage, or plexigram using porn images from the 1980’s. With the central figure cut out; we see the room, the couch, the TV, the potted plant, but no girl. We know she is there somewhere but see only a blank, an overlap, a juxtaposition. She slips, is missing, gone. Meanwhile our eye continues to search… Mar – April 2023: This work was exhibited in The Niche Gallery, Dumfries, Scotland.
Alette, Fan of Memory, The streets were ships, 2015
Alette, Fan of Memory, The streets were ships are collages created on salvaged glass – double glazed units and caravan windows – all designed to hang from the ceiling, Combining imagery from blue movies/vintage pornography, 70’s advertising and instructional leaflets, these works attempted to deconstruct memories of growing up in the 1970’s and to offer a critique of our collective nostalgia about this time. They were part of Fan of Memory an installation exhibited at Hidden Door Art Festival in Edinburgh, 2015.
Out of the woods, 2021
While painting outdoors in the summer of 2021, I experimented with performance on video. This informed the development of Old Dear in the headlamps, a two channel video installation I created the same year for Ecologies of Displacement a 9 month international residency and exhibition funded by the British Council and Creative Scotland.
blood/MarcyAve, 2013
2013 blood/MarcyAV, a girl’s heart of darkness was a collaborative exhibition with Michele Marcoux, New York artist Lynne Thermann and award winning US poet Sheila Black which was curated and designed by Michele Marcoux and took place at the Ambulance Depot, Edinburgh in 2013.
The project and exhibition looked at the experience of young women in 1980′s and 90’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn during a period when drugs were rife and crime rates soared (in 1988 more than 2000 people were murdered in New York City). A girl’s heart of darkness explores the nostalgia but also the pain of youth, and the implicit as well as explicit violence of life in the city at that time, especially for women.
The following four videos were created by Michele Marcoux for the exhibition.
I wished on the moon, 2013
A looping projection. Filmed and edited by Michele Marcoux, soundtrack by Lynne Thermann.
Laura, 2013
Filmed and edited by Michele Marcoux, voice over by Sheila Black and Lynne Thermann.
Cavernous, 2013
Filmed and edited by Michele Marcoux, voiceover Lynne Thermann
Lost, 2013
Edited by Michele Marcoux, sound by Lynne Thermann, poem Lost and reading by Sheila Black. Film clips from Night of the Living Dead by George Romero