Alix Marie: La Femme Fontaine

About

The show features an installation composed of concrete sculptures and fountain systems, which expands on her current investigation and critical inquiry of the body, its cultural representations and appropriations.

Marie’s La Femme Fontaine (2017) was originally commissioned as a site-specific work for her first exhibition in Italy at Matèria Gallery. Over the past months, she has been evolving and adding to the project, creating new sculptures for her solo show at Roman Road. The varied presented works are concrete casts of different parts of the artist’s body, which contain plastic tubes that channel and spurt out water. The exhibition displays Marie’s unique pieces on the floor and at differing heights on the walls of the gallery space, generating an immersive installation of fragmented forms.

Employing the human body as subject, La Femme Fontaine (2017 and 2018) explores themes of amorphousness, fluidity, and the deconstruction of gender stereotypes. The work has evolved from Marie’s interest in fluids and wetness, and their connection to feminine symbolism. Through the plastic tubing, liquid courses through her concrete sculptures, highlighting woman’s aqueous embodiment and challenging the abjection that surrounds the female body and it’s production of bodily fluids. The title of the work is taken from a popular French expression used to describe female ejaculation, a natural act that has been banned from being featured in pornography in the UK. With her installation, Marie also confronts the notion of woman’s fragility, rendering her indexical sculptures in commanding concrete.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the artist will be in conversation with Photoworks director Shoair Mavlian during the morning of Thursday 17 May at the gallery.