Birth Canal

Extending Marguerite’s fascination with deep time and the origins of humankind, Birth Canal (2018) and Ecstasies (2019) consider a moment lying some 150,000 years in the past, when Mitochondrial Eve is supposed to have lived. In this scene, a group of early women happened upon psychoactive substances and ingested them for the very first time, an event presumed to have prompted a change of perception through neuronal-biological re-organisation. During her research into the role of early trance in the development of spirituality, language and art, Marguerite discovered a paper by archaeologist Bethe Hagens, whose comparative study of Venus figurines and animal brains would come to inspire both exhibitions. Hagens’s theory postulates that the figurines are sculpted recipes referring to the animal brains eaten to achieve metamorphosis or spiritual ecstasy, with the artwork, then, behaving as an embodiment of altered consciousness.

From this, Marguerite created an extensive series of diagram-drawings and sculptures that sought to re-imagine humankind’s first trance. Amorphous stone and bronze-cast sculptures peer through a darkened exhibition space scented with a faintly sweet, mineral odour that evokes the bodily liquids released during birth. Referring to important, prehistoric Venus depictions, the ten statuettes render the figure mid-transformation into animal, brain, female bodies, landscape, forest. Appearing as if involved in a polyphonic séance, the sculpture-totems emit breathy chants that eventually harmonise into a single, musical note known to activate a trance in humans. Mattresses are distributed throughout the gallery space, inviting visitors to rest and join the meditative state induced by the presence of the Venus sculptures and their chorus. Conceiving of the entire building as a single nervous system, Marguerite programmed the heating system to switch on and off as if marking the brain’s switch into a trance. Like this, the exhibition renders palpable the shifting states of consciousness that bind the human and its environment with the cosmic.