Marguerite Humeau imagines worlds where the climate crisis has caused new species of creatures to evolve at alarming rates. Her current exhibition at the ICA in Miami, which is being installed as she talks to me by Zoom from a hallway in the museum, is called “\*sk\*/ey-,” a word she says comes from an ancient term for repulsion and splitting. Through film and sculpture, the artist adds, the show will evoke a world in which the burning earth sheds its skin, and these skins turn into “bodies that seem to belong in the sky.” Some of them climb out of the ground; others sit high on walls, as if about to take to the sky. The sculptures are at the same time high-tech, with a sci-fi sheen, and organic, made from materials such as rubber, walnut, wax and blown glass. “I always want my works to look like you don’t quite know how they were made,” says Humeau. “As if they are breathing or about to move.”






Works from \*sk\*/ey- in progress in Humeau’s studio, 2024



Photo by Eoin Greally, image courtesy of the artist





The sculptures, part of an ongoing series that the artist has created with a large team of specialists ranging from scientists to mystics, are both attractive and unnerving. Humeau, 37, even used three ‘geomancers’ – people who sense magical properties in certain locations on Earth – as part of Orisonsa 160-acre project in Colorado that she said was the largest piece of land art ever executed by a female artist. The plot she worked on, in the San Luis Valley, was so badly affected by the drought that it was declared impossible to farm. Humeau populated it with 84 sculptures, placed at points the geomancers had deemed important – ‘like acupuncture’ – to create a ritual that imagined a reactivation of the land, and the types of life forms that might survive the climate apocalypse. “At first you think there’s nothing there,” says Humeau, “but over time you start to see all these creatures that live underground and pass by. It made me think that life forms in this kind of context had to become creative, and also have to be extremely resilient.”





The film she made in the San Luis Valley will be shown as part of “\*sk\*/ey-.” Humeau turned the images of the place into a fable about death, rebirth, migration and a kind of afterlife. Although the climate crisis is its inescapable backdrop, “my work is not about being an activist,” she says. “It’s about telling stories and imagining possible ways to exist on Earth, and it also celebrates the power of imagination and collaboration – I have a huge team of people around me who make things happen.”





Humeau grew up in Beaupréau, in the Loire Valley in France, “a very small village where 70 percent of the inhabitants are called Humeau.” Her family moved to a larger city, Nantes, when she was 13. She grew up surrounded by museums and galleries and wanted to go to art school, but after not being accepted by anyone, she decided to take a textile course at the Ecole des Kunstapplications in Paris. She then studied industrial design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, but quit after 18 months. Her breakthrough came when she was accepted into the now defunct Design Interaction course at the Royal College of Art in London, which she said was “dedicated to thinking about the role of emerging technologies in our lives and developing scenarios of how things could go wrong. , or how they can influence us.”





Students on the course included artists, designers, poets, dancers and illustrators; this multidisciplinary approach stimulated Humeau’s imagination. Her diploma project was mentioned The opera of prehistoric creatures. She and audio developer Julien Bloit attempted to reconstruct the larynxes of prehistoric animals using data and MRI scans from woolly mammals frozen in Siberia, to make their voices heard again – at least in theory.


The following year, Tate Britain in London showed Humeau’s subsequent work, Echoesin which she allegedly presented the voice of Cleopatra singing a love song in the nine extinct languages ​​said to be spoken by the Queen of the Nile, in a gallery painted with a substance derived from the venom of the Black Mamba, the snake with which Cleopatra committed suicide. “I’m interested in what different states of being are,” says Humeau. “It is the recurring quest in my work to understand what it means to be present. Can you have a voice and no body? Does this mean you’re still alive? What is the bare minimum to feel someone’s presence?”





Since graduating, Humeau has continued to work in London, even though, as she jokes, “I sound like I’ve just arrived – my French accent has never changed.” She has a basic team of three people, although Humeau works with many outside artisans who help her craft her sculptures. “This show was challenging in a good way,” she says of “\*sk\*/ey-.” “The textile wall works are complex because we have developed all these new embellishment techniques. We cast felt, which is actually not possible. I am interested in beeswax because it is the product of collective organisms. We do a lot of material research.” Part of the inspiration for ‘\*sk\*/ey-‘ came from sifting through photos of bird nests, root systems and images of fungi under microscopes. All this is poured into sculptures that are rooted in nature as we know it, but still feel strange. “They’re a little bit larger than human size, which I think is definitely a little bit disturbing,” says Humeau.






Works from \*sk\*/ey- in progress in Humeau’s studio, 2024



Photo by Eoin Greally, image courtesy of the artist





Miami is certainly the ideal place to exhibit them, as it is one of the frontiers of the climate crisis. This connection was not lost on the artist. As she installed her pieces, Humeau stopped to watch “huge flocks of birds” flying over the ICA and migrating toward the Everglades. She noted that as her creatures escaped the burning planet and planned their journey to orbit, “there was a direct reflection of what happened in the show.”



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