Alix Marie
Du Cou, 2017
Alix Marie’s practice is concerned with the representations of the body and how its organicity, tactility and capacity to provoke emotions can be transferred to the photographic medium. ‘In my work I try to create bodily experiences,’ Marie says. ‘The body is at the center of my practice, whether in content or form, and my physical labour, my own body making the work, my own reaction to it, as much as the audience’s experience, are all important.’
To that end, Marie embraces sculpture to convert photography into a multisensory encounter. Other recurring techniques include processes of fragmentation, magnification and accumulation, and the mixing of mythological references with autobiography and intimacy. In Du Cou, the artist combines multiple close-ups of the nape of her neck, taken from different angles. The images come with instructions and should be exhibited rolled up in cylinders attached to one another. The smooth appearance of the photographic surface clashes with the discomfort generated by the ambiguous, unrecognisable representation of a body part. Marie thereby invokes how the female body has been made to signify Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, and criticises the impositions placed upon it by Western beauty standards.
Marie was born in Bobigny in 1989. She lives and works in London.
