Artel Studio Trust

Margaret Marks

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I use video, photography, textiles and performance in my work.My skills in patchwork, which had defined my earlier work, have been transformed into the manipulation of film. The time consuming processes of frame by frame manipulation and animation have echoes of the processes involved in stitching and quilting. Rhythm and pattern and repetition are recurring elements in my work. Recent work has been concerned with how we use our public face and mask our inner selves. My work expresses how social pressures, modern culture, the “rich tapestry of life” (one damn thing after another), combine to fragment the “self” into many bindweed-like stems of inter-twined emotions and reactions. In this aspect I am seduced by the theoretical rhizome model of thinking espoused by Gilles Deleuse and Félix Guatari (A Thousand Plateaus).

I gained a BA (Fine Art) Honours First Class in 2005 at Chichester University. As a textile artist I have taught and exhibited for many years, including teaching City and Guilds Creative Studies in Patchwork and Quilting up to 2001. I have switched my focus to Video Art, my first exhibition being in 2003/4 for the Channel 4 Self Portrait UK Touring Exhibition: National Portrait Gallery, London; Cardiff; Glasgow; Manchester; and Belfast. My latest art video, The Journey, was commissioned in November 2005 by West Sussex Arts Development Group and ‘Roots around the World’ world music group.