Zoë Marden’s works over the last years include themes of the aquatic cosmos, she creates immersive installations, video and performances. Her current series of ceramic works, multi-media installations and videos...
Zoë Marden’s works over the last years include themes of the aquatic cosmos, she creates immersive installations, video and performances. Her current series of ceramic works, multi-media installations and videos take us to the underwater world of organic feminine forms.
Zoë states, “The ceramic sculptures are creature-like, some in aquariums but look as if they might make a break for it and escape their containers. The shapes are organic, curved and rounded, some echoing the folds of a vulva. Others are plan-like with branches that fold over the edges of the glass containers. The metal sculptures, with their wonky legs, give off the appearance of bending or reaching with water pooling around each of their legs slowing this potential movement down. They are the creatures of an imaginary sea, a sea that may exist on another planet. They are speculative sea squirts, they are abstracted oysters or the ‘tentacular ones’ as Donna Harraway would call them, they are intrinsically queer in their refusal to be defined by any categories of gender or sexuality. They refuse to be contained just as Isabelle Stengers’ concept of Gaia, the earth as maker and destroyer, an intrusion on the exploitation by humankind and its destruction of the earth’s resources.”
Zoë Marden is an artist, curator and writer. She grew up in Hong Kong and is currently based in London. She works with performance, video, text, sound, sculpture and installation to create alternate worlds and speculative futures. Her work is research based and is concerned with where intersectional feminism overlaps with the post-colonial. Her intimate performances play with the voice, activating soundscapes of desire and vulnerability.
She graduated from the Royal College of Art, Fine Art: Moving Image MFA, London; Goldsmiths University, Curating MFA, London; The American University of Paris, History of Art BFA, Paris.