Below is a portfolio of the latest artwork by Michele Marcoux. Please click the images for details of projects.
How I make my work
I make paintings and collage, often in the landscape, and use video to document and discover new ideas. Each painting is an individual work but also part of an unfolding process. Painting is a means to think, to feel, to remember, to analyze. My work often starts with a story, perhaps a personal memory, perhaps the history of the place I am working in. This is the beginning of a process of searching for a reciprocity of story and form. Through experimenting with materials, oil, gouache, collage, found objects and images I am trying to locate a place where personal and collective memories overlap and something new is revealed.
Going on residency is essential to my practice
Artist residencies are incredibly inspiring and essential for doing research on location. In my portfolio of latest artwork many of the projects were the result of artist residencies. In 2023 I went on a solo journey to Aragon, Spain on a self-directed residency working in the countryside outside the medieval town of Jaca in the Pyrenees. On this trip I also worked 1200 meters up at the incredibly moving and evocative abandoned hill village of Bergosa (est c 900), which was forcibly depopulated in 1966 to make way for a dam project in Pamplona .
In 2021 I received a Creative Scotland grant to go on residency at Merz Gallery in Dumfriesshire Scotland where I explored the creative possibilities of two abandoned farm cottages. In 2021-22 I received a Connect and Collaborate grant from British Council and Creative Scotland for Ecologies of Displacement a 9-month collaborative international residency between Scotland and Pakistan.
In May 2025 I will be travelling to the Isle of Lewis for a Royal Scottish Academy Residency for Scotland. I will be working on location in the landscape and at a croft house and working with arts organisation An Lanntair.
