Upcoming and Recent
Underlying Structures
Solo Exhibition,
The New Glasgow Society,
Glasgow
April 2019
RSA
John Kinross Travel Award 2018
Florence Nov 2018
Leadenhall building, London, UK
Sept 2018- sept 2019
Marina Renee-Cemmick’s lives and works in Glasgow. As a visual artist, maker and performer her artistic practice is diverse in both material and process. Drawing serves as a foundation for all her visual work, initiating oil paintings, sculptural forms and installations. The body remains a central focus to her work and through this vessel she uses personal experience, symbolism and poetic image to express a feeling of collective consciousness.
Renee-Cemmick centres her work around the body in relation to the hidden or exposed infrastructures of the industrial landscape. She works to remove the layers and uncover the human qualities that connect us in a web of interdependence. Primitive bodily senses that keep us living: it’s structure, it’s breath, it’s beating heart. We are a collective body of feeling, emotion and communication, all taking part in the perpetual cycle of life death, and rebirth. Struggles and vulnerabilities link us in a experience that presents a sense of humanity even in the most industrialised and inhuman societies. Those where we have lost touch of our primitive senses, rituals and connection to the earth.
Living in Glasgow, she grew interested in the constant stream of roadworks, using this subject as a metaphor through which to examine continual cycles of wounding and healing. Viewing the city as a living organism, wires and pipes as veins and arteries, being clogged and unclogged. Digging into the earth and uncovering the internal structure that feeds our society, renders it with a fragility that reminds us of our own temporal and vulnerable existence.
Although Renee is a multi-disciplinary artist, drawing serves as a foundation for all her work. Often using representation of the human form, she has a capacity to capture people’s emotions through line. At the heart of her endeavour to draw everyday lies the need for understanding. Drawing is at the foundation of understanding. Her drawing approach changes often, working with ink intensely in small sketchbooks or dynamically using her body to create large gestural marks, but always intent on describing as she feels, the object within the space.
There is an importance in the process of the creation that her work presents visibly on the surface, often leaving finger and foot prints on the surface. Perhaps this reflects the subjects of her work; wanting to expose and remove the layers to discover what it is to be human, to experience and live a lifetime and be able to share it with others. To draw attention to the hidden spaces of human activity - in this case, hidden in the mundane of the everyday street. But often, her works present intimate spaces, those of internal thought, memory or moments of solitude. Those, that like creativity, happen on the sidewalks, the back alleys and hidden places where we allow our minds to wander and become lost in the emptiness.