About | Maria Clark Artist

I am an Anglo-French visual artist and performer. I live and work in Paris. My current research is based on the question of life process and borders on the themes of insularity, human scale, territories and body limits (human-animal, male-female, inside-outside,…).
I use my own body as my main medium. My media are multiple: video, film, photo, objets, drawing, painting, writing … Action Art and installations are also a large part of my practice.
I exhibit and perform in France and abroad since 2003 (Germany, Spain, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Italy, New Caledonia, Czech Republic) and win in 2013 the Art and Culture price (« Premio per la Cultura – Pentagramma d’Oro ») by the Fondazione Premio Galileo 2000 in Florence (Italy).
Working also as a life model, I found the Coordination of the Art Models association and publishes the essay À bras-le-corps (plâtrière éd ., 2012), a perambulation between my posing sessions and my performative works. I also develop a research on the questions of the model, the skin-envelope, presence and imprint. Some publications of articles, audiovisual realizations and curating.

I currently work on various SETS. Each element of the Set can be removed (or pass from a set to an other), and new elements can be added. The shape of the sets is thus variable in space and in time, allowing the work not to be definitive and to be constantly in process.

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Trained in France and London in visual & performance arts (plastic arts, cinema, contemporary danse and theater) at University (Montpellier/The Sorbonne Paris) and other institutions (Morley College-London), I also write texts (featured fictions, Essays, articles) – some of them being used in my creations. First of all, I’ve directed in 2001 a Super 8 experimental film Anatol (du pays des pierres) - Anatol (from the stones country), inspired from Armenia’s memory and history, exhibited in 2003 at the Paris-Berlin Meetings, then the video installation Le Mur d’en face (The Wall just oposite), about apartheid walls, showed in many places between 2006 and 2010. Supporting the struggle of undocumented migrants, I’m then concerned with obstacles to free movement and migratory movement, I often invest the public space with my work. The plotted line comes back regularly in my different creations : drawn on roads and grounds in a linear continuity or to demarcate distinct restricted areas corresponding to zones in wich I install myself. I keep still, alone or with my doll « missclark ». This immobility is sometimes accentuated by bonds. In 2010, regarding the French politics, I propose a new version of a muzzled Marianne, the national symbol of the French Republic, and, the same year, create a new independant territory, izone. The Insular body becomes my main theme, as well as the ontological limits and borders questionning the human nature. I ‘m interested in the relation between macrocosme and microcosme, in and out, impregnated with the traditional Chinese philosophies I studied for some years.

I like travelling in interstices and intermediaries spaces. I roam there, settle down, dive. So, I do work and create my life, building my presence to the world, linked to the others, the alive, objects, the invisible, suggesting axes, lines, imprints; from earth's crust to the skin, from the skin to the paper. I settle in the fabric of the world, I reinvent a new territory within the limit itself, a new point of view.