AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Pascaline Marre

Pascaline Marre’s work explores memory, absence, and the traces left by our intimate and collective territories. Trained in art history in the United States, she began with photography before expanding her practice to include gesture and material. Using inks and pigments on fabric, stone, wood, and paper, she creates works that resonate with her photographic research.

In a creative process, do we ever know what is at work?

I photograph, I paint, I weave, I explore the material and work with its surface.

Inevitably permeable to the world around me, I weave stories, pulling a thread from among the many that present themselves and whose resonance responds to a necessity. Thus, I explored collective and individual stories through photography first and foremost and for many years.

After studying art history in the United States, I started exploring photography — a passion that has animated me since childhood. At first, my work focused on historical and memorial issues, in relation to our present-day evolving societies. I questioned the human impulse to dominate minorities, as a fantasized condition of one’s survival.

Alongside these social concerns, I have pursued a more intimate body of work centered on connection and memory, and on our personal ties to the visible and invisible worlds, through photographic series inspired by the founding myths; the ones that brings us back to nature and to the necessity of renewing our bond with the environment that shapes and sustains us.

In recent years, responding to a need to explore the gesture and the surface, my practice has expanded into other fields of exploration through painting, collage, works on textile and paper incorporating collected objects. This need to engage directly with material became a new point of anchorage, in which the medium itself is both a source of inspiration and a subject of inquiry.