Marie Marchant
“Shades” Artist Statement
Shades is a series of three collages, each made of 3, 1’x3’ sheets of plastic sewn together and collaged on. Collaged materials include, embroidery thread, sewing thread, yarn, plastic adhesive sheet, paper, tape, and other found materials (i.e. tobacco bag, lock of hair). Each panel is an abstract collage of objects all of the same shade blue. The panels are of cobalt blue, sky blue, and aqua. Each panel is created with focus on composition and texture. Each layer of plastic is transparent yet imposes a slight foggy-ness to the color when layered on top of one another. Many of the shapes within the piece are geometric shapes and layouts with little organic shapes intermixing within the piece. The decision to keep to a relatively exclusive rectangular theme within the three panels was done so to emulate artists that influenced the piece, such as Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg.
Creating this piece was a much more experimental piece for me as an artist. Typically most of my works are made with lots of symbolism and full composition planned out. However, for Shades I chose to focus on materiality, and color. Using those two to motivate the composition and configuration of the piece. I was very excited to experiment and create art in such a playful manner. I have wanted to work with color and using that as a rule in my artwork. The way in which I structured this piece so that there was some organization and planning to the piece was by first selecting which colors I wanted to use. I chose blue simply because I was inspired from a studio visit with artist David Korty, where he was using incredibly deep shades of blues in his work. Blue is also a very pleasing color to the eye and is relatively peaceful and calm, something I wanted to be expressed as to not become overwhelming to look at. I hope that the viewer is able to look at the piece in a calm contemplation. Next I chose what kind of materials I was going to use in this piece, I knew I wanted to utilize the plastic and have layers overlapping to create a final composition. As well as all be unsown completely together so one is able to view each layer individually as well. For the colored material, I chose items that can easily be sewn since that was my chosen method of application. As well as, items of all the same color with differing textures, in order to create as much visual interest as possible.
I began to assemble the pieces by starting with the back layer of each panel focusing on creating a generally large colorfield for smaller objects to lay against. I then used tape and other materials such as paper to create vertical and horizontal lines along the panels for movement and composition. The placement for many of these objects was based on their materiality and how they react and converse with one another. Much of the composition was based and motivated off of intuition and the materials. I also used similar techniques and imagery in the panels as well. I used an “X” stitching on many of the materials in order to sew them onto the plastic. I also used the severed hand imagery in each panel in order to have some sort of representative imagery link and connect all three panels together. Using the image as a signature of me as an artist, as well as to represent the artists hand in the work as it is very indexical of hand stitching.
The pieces themselves were very much influenced by the color fields of Mark Rothko’s paintings as well as Robert Rauschenberg’s use of collage and mixed media. Even within Rauschenberg’s mixed media pieces, he does include some organic shapes but has a sort of grid that he lays everything out on. I wanted to resemble this, yet include the additional element of layering these shapes and found objects on top of one another to ultimately create one final composition. Creating three color fields of texture and space, something non-representative, allowing one to focus on the color and materiality of the piece.
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