Haunting the Future, 2024
Haunting the Future, Installation view, The Invisible Dog, Brooklyn, NY, 2024. Vellum, bioplastic, galvanised aluminium, canvas, bass wood, copper, mirror, wood, living plants, video, sand, pebbles, soil, peat moss, thread, brass rods, living grass sod. 16 feet (width) x 20 feet (length) x 9 feet (height) approximately. (Photo credit: Argenis Apolonari)
Haunting the Future is an immersive, multi-media installation that uses myth to speculate about possible worlds. Boats representing potential future imaginaries float above a Garden of the Future. The boats are composed of different materials and pose as vessels for present-day myth making and imagining different futures. The garden also acts as a metaphor drawing upon various histories, myths and symbolisms. The earth underfoot is unsettled by the upside-downness of boats in the sky and a cosmic pool within the garden. Viewers can walk around and through the work. They can situate themselves through sensation and discovery and the resonance and symbolism of myth to imagine their own possible future.
Sky, Sea, Earth: Woven Futures, 2024
“Sky, Sea, Earth: Woven Futures” represents a prologue to Haunting the Future. This work follows a non-linear format and consists of a research narrative, vignettes from my own history, fact-based field notes, poetry and images. These elements act as strata, referencing Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas, creating layers to consider and experiment with. As such, the document can be read in many ways. Readers may dip into any part of it, create a narrative from multiple strata, peruse each stratum as a whole, for example all the poems or the vignettes, or read the document from start to finish.
Infinite Line, 2023
Infinite Line, 2023. Sewing machine parts, fishing line, recycled metal refrigerator shelves, video, projectors, wash tub, sewing machine, thread, used bed linens, water. Dimensions variable.
Infinite Line deals with the violent manifestations of colonial capitalism specifically as they relate to women and their exploited labour including in the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. The installation has 4 parts: hanging fragments of a dismantled old sewing machine with video projected on the floor, an aluminium wash tub filled with water with video projected onto the base of the tub, an infinite line sewn onto fabric in a sewing machine on a table and a soundscape.
Video of this installation with sound work on Vimeo here
Erosion, 2023
Erosion, 2023. 10 prints, crystal clear film, alligator pins, wooden dowel, fishing line, video. Installation shot Platform Space, Belfast.
This sequence of prints are taken from a single photo capturing a deep runnel etched into a trail in the mountains along California’s coast. Heavy rains had eroded this deep channel, creating a striking scene. The 10 prints on crystal clear film are eroded from 100% to 10% transparency and hung in sequence from the ceiling. While erosion is a natural phenomenon, this encounter served as a stark reminder of the broader challenges we face.
Blackout and the Nua Collective
Left: Blackout exhibit view, Green Sheep Studio, Thurles, Ireland, 2024 (Photo credit: Eamonn Shanahan). Right: Blackout, 2023. Linocut print
I am part of the Nua Collective. We work collaboratively on projects. Our most recent one was called Blackout. Using the Erosion photo, I created a digital image which was transferred to a lino cut to create this print (printed by Robert Jackson, Nua member). In today’s world, where climate-related events occur with alarming frequency, this darkened print suggests the blackout that is imminent and the urgent need to address human-induced changes.
Contemplating Loss, 2022
Top: Detail of 3 drawings on paper with ink, 9 x 12 in. Bottom: Contemplating Loss, 2023, Installation shot (middle work on wall), Gramercy Gallery, New York
Contemplating Loss is a collage of 27 drawings that reflect on the loss of a porpoise suggesting a complex intimacy with a nonhuman. The work used a meditative drawing process to contemplate the simple beauty of porpoise bones from a body that washed up on a local beach. The work asks us to consider mortality—our own and others—and to think about the results of our human activity on the planet. Whilst our lives are marked by loss, these bones symbolise the extreme devastation we are experiencing in nature in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction.
Shroud: Excavating My Ghosts, 2021
Video on Vimeo here, narrative poem PDF here
Shroud is a narrative poem in video form drawing on the artist’s experience. Themes of dislocation due to immigration and loss are explored. Video combined with still imagery and the poem guide the viewer through the desolate loss of leaving homeland and the heartbreak of adjustment in an unfamiliar place. The video uses images from the natural world as metaphor. For example, water signifies the journey the immigrant faces and a twisted branch suggests the tortures a body and psyche undergoes. Finally, the work illustrates that in time, hope exists and that somewhat inevitably, opportunities for new or renewed life emerge.
Ghost in the Machine (Fragmented Modernities), 2023
Ghost in the Machine (Fragmented Modernities), 2023. Canvas, acrylic, thread, steel galvanised wire, copper wire, red coated copper wire, Dimensions Variable. Installation view, Flatiron Gallery (Photo credit: Garland Quek)
The system is broken down, lying around us in fragments. Ghost in the Machine imagines a different future, stitching the pieces together and weaving new possibilities for a post-anthropogenic world.
Body Prints, 2023
Left: Stigmatised (Transhuman), 2024, charcoal, digital debris (recycled), paper, 36 ⅝ in x 64 ¾ in Right: The Body Doesn’t Ask Why (Body Print), 2023. Oil, pigment (Prussian Blue), charcoal, wood (recycled), paper. 36 in. x 66 in.
Stigmatised (Transhuman) is part of a series called “Hybrid Humans” that considers the future body. Using a body print and collage, this work explores the impact of technology on our embodied and spiritual presence(t). The transhuman body bears the stigmata of the technic—marked by digital circuitry and wiring. Their hands may be held up to stave off the onslaught of technology on our world and cosmologies or perhaps they are standing firm amidst the new assemblages of human and machine. This work questions what our technological legacy will be.
e/immigration Series, 2024
Top left: The Ties That Bind (Scatter: Greystones, Ireland—New York, USA), 2024. Photo collage on artist canvas paper on board, thread. 10 in x 10 in. Top middle: Scatter: Greystones, Ireland—New York, USA, 2024. Photo collage, inkjet print on niyodo paper. 22 x 24 in Top right: Rooted Yet Displaced (Greystones, Ireland—New York, USA), 2024, photo collage, inkjet print on artist canvas, thread on gesso board, 12 x 12 in Bottom: Scatter: Greystones, Ireland—New Haven, CT, USA, 2024. Photo collage, inkjet print on canvas. 24 x 13.5 in
Maria Markham 