Anne de Marcken | Artist Statement
I approach my interdisciplinary practice as a creative/critical process of discernment and clarification through physicalized inquiry, centering questions about impermanence, invisibility and the abject.
For long stretches of my childhood, I lived without electricity or running water in isolated, beautiful places. It was an anachronistic upbringing—equal parts pragmatic and romantic. It made me observant, resourceful, tolerant of discomfort…all good in an emergency or a studio.
It fostered in me a generative material relationship to place, process and labor that inform my work at least as much as my formal education in writing and media, being queer, my parents’ hand-me-down modernism or the riot grrl ethos of my creative coming-of-age.
I material-ize and locate questions, quandaries, memories and emotions in physical or imaginary spaces, in the bodies of characters and in my own body. I engage the conceptual and material qualities of narrative, social and ecological structures through literary, cinematic, architectural and vernacular forms and processes, (re)creating the conditions for discovery, invention and connection by putting ideas and disciplines in productive tension and by establishing rigorous structural and process-based constraints.
The nature of a given question (project) and my relationship to it (physical, emotional, cultural, intellectual) determine the media I employ. Whether I am working with the constraints of collaboration or isolation, of site-specific installation or auto-fictional narrative, transformation is the essential artifact of every project I undertake. It constitutes the position from which I undertake the next creative/critical endeavor. From one project to the next, across disciplines, there is a continuity of consciousness as well as cumulative critical complexity.