Marie Muller Priqueler on the work “La Vitalité Hybride”:

“Over the past two years, I have attempted in my work to think about the female body and intimacy outside the discourses on sexism and capitalism that I find debilitating and therefore limiting. Using my body as my main medium, I return to newly-marginalised, ‘essentialist’ feminist art practices of the 1970s and ‘80s, which considered the connection between women and the natural world, to explore again, in a new century, the notion of female subjectivity as produced through the female body as it walks through, brushes past and lies upon such environments as the forest-floor.

Over the past few months, I have photographed details of my body and nature, developing films with plant-based developers, printing them onto plant-based papers that I create and seed myself. The fragility and transparency of these papers resemble the thin veil of skin. I like to imagine my body and nature as entangled, as a relation that is about tenderness and infinity as well as femininity.

I leave these prints in the forest, strapped around trunks, weighted down in the mud, buried under the moss or afloat in a stream. The papers, which are biodegradable, are sometimes eaten by insects and other animals. At other times, they are destroyed by the roots of plants growing from the paper they are printed upon, the work both consuming and sustaining itself. On occasions, they simply decay from exposure to the elements.

I theorise such transformations as stages within a ‘body system’, as ritualised moments of change in which I return a part of myself to nature, channelling the energy borrowed from the natural world during my creative process”.

Marie Muller Priqueler (b. 1993, Besancon, France; London, UK), visual artist.

In 2020 she graduated with Merit from an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in London; she organised an online student-led talk with Sophie Calle and was a collective leader with few RCA colleagues.

Marie holds a European Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and Contemporary Image and different Paper-making, Art Therapy, and Aromatherapy certificates. Recent group exhibitions include: With Fists, it Kicks, it Bites at Webber Gallery, London (2020) and Everything the Same//Everything a Little Different at The Newington Art Academy, London (2019), where Marie was co-curator and founder. Recent publications and features include The Daughter Terra (2021), Fall Into Place RCA (2020), self-published La Chatte au Miel (2019) and the articles by P Magazine, Foto Femme United, Curated by Girls (2020).

Author's website: mariemullerpriqueler.com