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Marcia Teusink

Stamford HIll
Marcia Teusink is a multi-disciplinary, London-based artist whose practice focuses on the intertwined history of people and plants, through painting, video and mixed media sculpture and installations.
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Plants have always been on the move, their seeds being carried by wind and birds, mammals and human beings, but the pace of these relocations sped up drastically when European colonial plant hunters began to circumnavigate the globe, seizing plant specimens to carry home and to show off for study, profit and sometimes fame. Some plants fit in quietly in their new homes, some needed highly artificial environments to survive, and some spread rapidly and threatened the stability of their new ecosystems. 

My work often responds to specific plant stories, for example the British obsession with red dye from the cochineal bug, which was cultivated on the prickly pear cactus in Mexico, for their military uniforms; the ‘discovery’ of the Amorphophallus Titanum plant, which made one Italian botanist a celebrity and which is now the prize of many a botanical garden; and the invasion (and possible phytoremediation) by the acacia plant of a post-industrial site outside of Lisbon. 

I combine and transform imagery from historic engravings, maps and photographs in painting  and other materials as a way of working through my own confusion and fear about biodiversity loss and providing space to the many players, human and non-human, in these convoluted and still-evolving stories. 

 

The Impossibility of Containment (The Wardian Case)

Flo(ra)tilla Installation

EN TIBI: Here for You a Smiling Garden of Everlasting Flowers

In Tatters (A botanical map after the fall of the empire)

Herbaria Series

Outgrowing the Botanical Cabinet (Phyllostachys Nigra)

Floratilla

The Watcher

Submersible

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Highlights: 19 - 25 August, 2024

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