Surface Horizon

Marking a shift in Marguerite’s practice from ideas of physical extinction to those of mental landscapes, Surface Horizon is an exhibition conceived as an ecosystem, one dedicated to the invisible interactions that occur in the ground. Conferring with a specialist in the Doctrine of Signatures – a theory correlating the physical attributes of plants with their medicinal uses – the project takes ‘bad’ weeds as its protagonists. In so doing, Marguerite subverts a key concept from soil science, extrapolating from the term ‘surface horizon’ – a sublayer where dead matter lies dormant before being transformed into other living organisms – to infer a place of possibility.

Marguerite devised a series of sculptures, pastel drawings and ‘plant performances’, with evolving, verdant gardens mapped out as a walk across the gallery’s courtyard and multiple floors, following the layered composition of the ground. A clairvoyant guide present at the exhibition leads visitors to a pavilion, where she instigates intense moments of reflection through a series of prompts: ‘What is dormant in you? What is lost, reborn, changed? What returns?’ Pointing to the hidden potentials contained within all life, her questions call up unnamed and emerging emotions, engaging the visitor in an internal, psychological ‘surface horizon’. Further to months-long research supported by medicinal plant specialists, astrobotanists, horticultural engineers, landscape designers, Marguerite was led by an experienced forager and the DoS as just two examples of the discrete knowledges that have disappeared from today’s mental landscapes. By resuscitating old and alternative forms of knowing, the artist seeks to find a new, generative space for myth, one in which we may develop a relationship to the natural world that allows imperceptible signals to come forth, ones that help us to imagine a new world.