Scintille

scintille is an immersive, total environment that reimagines the gallery space as a cave, with artworks appearing in dappled light or picked out of the dark. Inspired by Marguerite’s visit to a cave in West Papua and the primordial darkness she experienced there, the exhibition title derives from the Latin word ‘scintilla’, to mean a spark, flash or, by extension, the glimmers of early understanding or new emotions, and conversely, the struggle to find words equipped to describe them. Issuing from extensive research into cave architecture and ecosystems, which Marguerite undertook with the help of chiropterologists, minerologists, speleologists and others, scintille understands the incremental growth of the stalagmite as a ‘repeated act of faith’, and the social behaviour of bat colonies as founded upon ‘acts of care’. Premised on this understanding, Marguerite’s monumental ‘guardian’ sculptures and amorphous drawings with vein-like traceries are created through emergent processes of material layering. Associating darkness with the unknown and the uncertain, this body of work also sees Marguerite returning to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (2021), John Koenig’s English language experiment for as-yet unnamed emotions which first inspired her exhibition Energy Flows (2022). Conceiving of an ‘emotional landscape populated with sculptural relationships’, many of the works of scintille are titled after Marguerite’s own neologisms and their respective definitions or, as in the case of the glass-sculpted bats, their assigned social roles which foreground a collective resilience. The exhibition is navigated through the words of a poet whose work explores how language inhabits the body, in ways of speaking, stuttering, doubting, hesitating, in realms of sense and sensitivity.