ARTISTS
Marlene McCarty: ExhibitionSasi Guztien Gainetik
Sasi guztien gainetik (Over the Brambles), by Marlene McCarty, is a search for what lies just beyond the visible. A sinuous exploration that, as the artist herself suggests, resembles an encounter with female sexuality: 鈥淵ou have to get in there and (metaphorically) dig around鈥�.
The exposition showcases plants; drawings of plants and primates, and drawings made from plant substance itself. Marlene McCarty's drawings are complex accumulations of matter, layers of lines that obscure and reveal each other. Viewing them becomes more complex as one is drawn in: a new detail that initially seemed to be absent always emerges, a new vanishing point that goes unnoticed in the whole and veers off in another direction. The exhibition invites us to spend time with plants that have long histories of powerful interactions with the human body: they can kill us, heal us, and affect our reproductive system. Many of them were used in witches' concoctions or in midwives' recipes dating back to the Middle Ages 鈥� and all of them grow, often wild, in the Basque Country.
Although there are multiple layers of meaning that are difficult to unpack in one-track glimpses, Sasi guztien gainetik can be experienced as an interspecies encounter inciting us to reconcile all we share with animals and plants, including our individual relationship with them. In the face of environmental collapse and the threats of regression periodically looming over women鈥檚 sexual and reproductive rights, the exhibition invites us to explore the potential for self-empowerment implicit in both the recognition of other species鈥� agency and the recovery of ancestral female knowledge that has been devastated by the project of modernity.
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Sasi guztien gainetik (Over the Brambles), by Marlene McCarty, is a search for what lies just beyond the visible. A sinuous exploration that, as the artist herself suggests, resembles an encounter with female sexuality: 鈥淵ou have to get in there and (metaphorically) dig around鈥�.
The exposition showcases plants; drawings of plants and primates, and drawings made from plant substance itself. Marlene McCarty's drawings are complex accumulations of matter, layers of lines that obscure and reveal each other. Viewing them becomes more complex as one is drawn in: a new detail that initially seemed to be absent always emerges, a new vanishing point that goes unnoticed in the whole and veers off in another direction. The exhibition invites us to spend time with plants that have long histories of powerful interactions with the human body: they can kill us, heal us, and affect our reproductive system. Many of them were used in witches' concoctions or in midwives' recipes dating back to the Middle Ages 鈥� and all of them grow, often wild, in the Basque Country.
Although there are multiple layers of meaning that are difficult to unpack in one-track glimpses, Sasi guztien gainetik can be experienced as an interspecies encounter inciting us to reconcile all we share with animals and plants, including our individual relationship with them. In the face of environmental collapse and the threats of regression periodically looming over women鈥檚 sexual and reproductive rights, the exhibition invites us to explore the potential for self-empowerment implicit in both the recognition of other species鈥� agency and the recovery of ancestral female knowledge that has been devastated by the project of modernity.
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