(The Art Vault, Mildura, 2011)

 

Artist’s Statement

Marie’s work is about the mystery of changes in the life circle, the transience in life; about seasons and time passing by.

The door handles and key holes

Through her life, she says, she has been deeply dependent on the memories of her childhood, those she loved and those she knew only from the stories passed on to her. She returns occasionally to her place of origin, visiting archives in Prague, Vienna or Silesia and photographing what is left, be it three pears on the last tree left of her grandfather’s orchard, where now is a busy metro station. The physical remains of old abandoned buildings, crumbling doors, the old patina on handles in her images reflect the nostalgia for the past and her engagement with her surroundings in a both physical and emotional way. Her images contain positive and negative symbols and the textural changes of the subjects represent the alchemy of aging.

Surrounded by nature

The selection from her extensive collection of Sun prints and Photograms represent her experimentation to find the perfect combination of subject and the technology to capture the sense of place with respect for the environment she lives in. They reflect her physical engagement with nostalgic aspects of imagination by staining, hand-coating or hand-colouring the prints and by this making them not reproducible.

The winter sun

The winter sun images correspond with her obscured, subliminal visions as metaphors for states of being.