My name is Marion Beaupère, I was born in 1991 in France near Paris.
I am a solo freelance traveller and visual artist. My goal is to capture images. I create forms with what the world presents to me, filtered through my eyes with plastic means: painting, drawing, photography, land art, sculpture and video. Using these different art forms, I tell the world of my vision. I travel to meet, to feel and to live the energies of the world and use them to create forms and ideas.
I began painting at a very young age. Painting was a catharsis to empty myself. I realized how the society in which I lived offered me a prefabricated life – artificial and meaningless. At eighteen, I left the life I had always known and began travelling. This opened my vision, allowing me to develop personally and to interact with other people and their unique cultures. I wanted to find more meaning and to move towards that greater meaning. I wanted to make plastic stories of the world, not just about me. Because we are all connected, I saw something more universal inside all of this. I see my approach today as the founding act of my true self.
« Re-looking » is already an act that filters and transcribes. It is subjective and so there is distortion as a result of past personal experience and the passing of time. I try to maximise the purity of “re-looking” but my eyes are already a filter. Travel is an opportunity to reflect on the filters that education and modern society values have influenced. Travel is a questioning of the influences on oneself. It is not just about geography, it is also about introspection, risk-taking and expression.
My plastic artworks talk about a discomfort, an unease of society, fragility, the subconscious, the landscape of mind and body, sex – a disquieting strangeness. I like to use different mediums because they all have their own specificity and this allows me to express many different aspects of my ideas and feelings.
The process of my drawing is like automatic writing – a graphic landscape of mind. In contrast, my paintings are much more loaded with plastic material. They are like the expression of the body. Part of me is not conscious when I am drawing. I am aware that at that time I know what I want to do, but not the end result. I fix on paper the ink of my mind. Like a flow in an obsessive way – a strata of memories, emotions felt, fragments of travel.
I can register on paper, mountains I crossed in Laddakh, sections of trees I saw in Angkor Watt, nuns I met in a monastery in India. Bodies imprint as memories. It is like a kind of cartography of my travel and my mind. The role of time is important, much ‘the make’ of the present moment than in the meaning of the drawing. I question the body, it’s presence between appearance and deletion. I etch bodies on paper. I mix bodies, pieces of bodies, areas of bodies – sometimes transformed, erased, androgynous, and carnal – imprinted on graphic surfaces. Most of them also have tattoos engraved in their skin, like a mark of life, a rite of passage. The fineness of the line is in tune with the fineness of the bodies, like a landscape.