Wax Photographs, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Roman Road.
At Foto Wien photography festival, you can walk into a cylindrical tent, only to be confronted with a magnified image of bare breasts and dimpled stomach, a dark tunnel of belly button and gently sagging folds of skin. It is both the woman’s body as we know it, and also not — a reminder that in photographic form we are not so used to seeing the female body as it is, soft and rounded, flecked with imperfections. The work is by French artist Alix Marie, and is a depiction of her mother’s body printed on the inside of semi-transparent silk curtains. “You’re kind of surrounded by a maternal body, with all its details, like a body of the woman who is not 20 years old,” she tells SLEEK.
This is an essential concern for the London-based artist, who is — as she puts it — interested in the “beauty in the details.” After completing an BA in fine art at Central Saint Martins in London and an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art, Marie has honed a specific practice that exists somewhere between photography and sculpture. Her work involves printing out zoom-ins of the body’s particulars — skin dotted with goosebumps; bloated bellies; the light fuzz of arm hair; the blistering bump of a nipple — onto a variety of materials, textures and supports, including wax paper, PVC, glass, metal and silk. After her MA, Marie says that she realised that she “wasn’t going to be a photographer” but that she didn’t “know whether to choose between touch or vision really.” It is a useful way in which to consider her practice overall: her work suggests the fullness of the tactile, feeling body but also the flatness and strangeness of its details when reproduced in photographic form.
Courtesy of the artist and Roman Road.
When applied to Marie’s work, the term “beauty” is pushed to its limits. In one work from 2016, for example, a PVC print of a cow’s tongue — her eye isn’t limited to the human body — is blown-up to reveal its bumpy texture, boiled pink and pimpled, marbled with veins of blood here and there. In another, a human bruise is excruciatingly enlarged to emphasise its purpley shades — lilac, mauve, puce — mottled yellow and grey on the outer rim. To take a step back and stare at its ruddy core, is to witness something akin to a Rorschach spatter unfolding and opening itself up to revelation.
This type of encounter is central to Marie’s practice. “I hope that [the viewers] experience something. And something bodily, so that they are made aware of how to look at things or how to interact with something,” explains Marie. This act of close-looking that summons a visceral sensation is mirrored in her own approach to the subject matter. “When we talk about bodies, the physical aspects of the work is really important to me, whether it’s my reaction to my body and my physical labour or how my relationship to the material translates to the materiality of the piece itself. And then the bodily reaction that translates into the viewer,” says Marie. “I really believe in content and form being together: the subject of what you’re working on has to be linked to the material that you’ll be using.”
In a number of her works that cross over sculpture and photography, paper is scrunched up to distort the sanitised smoothness of the body we’ve become accustomed to seeing in mass media. But, in many ways, these crinkled contortions seem much more closer to the real thing, which is, of course, important to Marie. “I see my work as a genuine depiction, so I would never use Photoshop to make anything look better. I usually photograph people in my intimate circle, so what interests me is genuine, honest representation of the body, whether it’s an older, elderly body like what I did with my mother or whether it’s just friends and their bruises, and that’s something we never see today. I guess these are my tiny protests,” muses Marie. “I think there’s a responsibility to show the body how it is.”
Wax Photographs, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Roman Road.
Besides from representing the body authentically, inevitably — when dealing with this subject matter — gender is a concern. For her upcoming show at her London gallery, Roman Road, entitled Shredded, she will explore the social construction of masculinity through the physicality of body builders. In contrast, her installation La Femme Fontaine (2017) investigated the gendered connection between the female body and fluidity. For the sculpture she made for her degree show, Orlando — a monumental mound of papery parcels that closely resembled fleshy hunks of meat but were in fact close-up photos of her boyfriend at the time’s body — took its name from not just her subject, but also the famous Virginia Woolf novel about a man who transitions into a woman. “To me, the piece was about that. It was about when in love, genders melt together, you become this kind of non gender.”
Through her uncanny zoom-ins, Marie moves beyond the narrow confines of gendered bodies. Instead the body is emphasised as a site of intimacy, closeness, connection — bodies being so intertwined with one another they become unrecognisable as singular entities. In some ways, Marie relates this to the school of thought that imagines the camera to be more like a mouth as opposed to an eye. “You know, this idea of incorporating the other one in order to eat the other one. To me, that relates to these ideas of intimacy and love.”
You can see more of Alix Maries work here:
All images courtesy of Alix Marie and Roman Road.