Dust

Originating in the map of presences drawn by geomancers for Marguerite’s Colorado-based Orisons (2023) earthwork, as well as the ‘felt’ changes and moments of magic that the artist experienced during her time there, DUST comprises drawings and sculptures that model living fields of energy and moving masses of dust. With each new sculpture dedicated to an event or ‘activation point’ identified at Orisons – be it extraction pipes, the remains of a cattleguard, or ‘predictions from the sky’ – Marguerite gives shape to intimate and otherwise unknowable dimensions of the San Luis Valley site. Placed upon open, iridescent plinths made from zinc-passivated steel, the sculptures invite close looking and often feature small, terracotta figurines overtaken by forms in copper wire that were hand-knitted by an artisan. One such example is the disappearance of the bird (2024), in which the funeral Marguerite staged for a found, dead bird is visualised by a clay statuette being transported from one realm to another, by way of two intricately woven spheres and an umbilical cord or channel. Taking dust as an active agent within the Orisons milieu, Marguerite’s exhibition imbues the humble, particulate matter with resonance and meaning. Comprised as it is of dead skin cells, plant fibres, pollen, soil, bacteria, Marguerite understands dust as the connector of life with death, and a carrier of multiple temporalities. In the suite of ‘ghost map’ drawings that accompany the sculptures, nebulous blooms of pigment and water act as schemas for whirling, energetic forces, and point to the fallow crop circle of Orisons as ‘an access to the nets of spacetime’.