Energy Flows

Energy Flows is a project concerned with the extinction and emergence of emotions, one that considers alternative modes of communication and, through this, the circulation of information between different lifeforms. Emerging out of ideas initiated in What Lies Dormant? (2021) as well as Marguerite’s persisting interest in the Doctrine of Signatures, the artworks in Energy Flows are underpinned by the concept of the elixir: as a potion concocted to tend to a specific ailment. The exhibition also cites John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (2021) – a key text to which Marguerite repeatedly returns – which attends to emotions that humans are unable to perceive or name. To create the pastel and charcoal ‘elixir-drawings’ and mixed media ‘elixir-sculptures’ of Energy Flows, the artist conjured a list of unnamed emotions before researching botanicals that may arouse that specific emotion, then finally reinterpreting the plant as sculpture or drawing. At once artworks and active agents intended to invoke the unnameable, Marguerite’s elixirs-sculptures emerge out of the dimly lit gallery space and incorporate a plethora of natural, artificial and unstable materials – from paraffin wax and thermochromic pigments, to earth, sugars and grains. Appearing caught between states, or undergoing transformation, the ‘elixirs’ respond to shifting dynamics of colour and light, their changeling property itself a meditation upon the myriad ways humans attempt to make sense of more-than-human worlds. A suite of elixir-drawings in flesh-toned, resin-cast frames occupies the walls; informed by soil studies and created with the aid of AI technology specialising in intelligent dynamic network models, these works speak of a sympathy between structures in nature and those designed by humankind.