Matheline Marmy’s artistic practice became a fascination during an overlapping trip we shared in Cape Town earlier this year. In the brief time we had in the city, I was able to live vicariously through the research trip she undertook. Hours were spent paying close attention to fossils in the national museum, discovering a discreet little gem shop with a hidden stone collection in their basement, or hearing about her excursions to the Table Mountain and its abandoned roads, guided by a local geologist.

Elementary Pulses, builds on the essence of the artists interest in minerals, in what is organic and inorganic, a practice that she has developed over several years rooting in her interest in active processes, be they alive or not, which can be found directly in our surrounding environment or through human interactions with materials.

The space becomes a laboratory, in which these two ways of being are presented through sculpture and installation. Hand blown glass test tubes are filled with silica gel, creating an ecosystem for self-growing synthetic iron crystals, which adjust their color organically due to different types of exposers within their environment.

Matheline invites us to step into her silent world, a creation of semi-life within a reactive lab where microscopic activity results in a macroscopic experience, where no detail goes unnoticed. Matheline’s eye even catches the small print on the Iziko South African Museum receipt, sending me an image of the docket months after our visit: ‘Please don’t be a fossil before you return again’.

Biography: Matheline Marmy (*1993 in Geneva) studied at ECAL and HFBK (Hamburg) in photography and received her MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2019). Recent exhibitions were held at the Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Unanimous Consent (Zürich), Rib (Rotterdam), Langmatt Museum (Baden) and Kunsthaus Langenthal for Kiefer Hablitzel Preis 2020. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Mondrian Stipendium for Emerging Artists.