Céline Pelcé

ARTIST STATEMENT

Considering eating as a symbiotic and symbolic experience, Céline imagines the narrations of collective experiences to accompany the Eater in the perception of his/her surroundings. Conducting field work in different contexts, she experiments contact zones between tastes and landscapes, and explores how the bodies, their gestures and related rituals can be the tools to a journey through the complexity of the places we live in, for a sensorial understanding.

BIO: Céline Pelcé is a French food artist and designer, currently working in a nomadic and contextual dynamic, mostly between North America and Western Europe. Her background is in both food and interior design that she studied in France. Since then, she’s been exploring food as a material carrying sensory poetics and narrations in different territories, to create culinary performances, unfolding dramaturgies and questions. Mixing work in the context of events, educational, and artistic practice, Céline Pelcé mainly works in collaboration with designers, artisans, chefs, and artists, in order to cross mediums for a common narrative. She has notably worked with the design unit of Lab-Ah in a psychiatric hospital unit (FR), and collaborated with the foodlab of the Jan Van Eyck Academy (NL). She shares her work in different cultural context, institutional places (Gent Design Museum, Collection Lambert in Avignon) as in local community-run projects. In parallel, her expertise also takes place in social, educational and hospital contexts. Eventually, an important part of Céline Pelcé’s practice is to explore Human cultural and spiritual relation to food and related rituals, especially by doing residencies, to conduct field works with locals, specially in North America, Western Europe and Japan.

Fish wrapped in Lotus leaf from 'Everything Starts from Within' - Dinner Experience in collaboration with The Performance Agency for the Kemmler & Kemmler Launch in Berlin, May 2022. (Photo owned by The Performance Agency). ’Everything Starts From Within’ was inspired by visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction in which she elevates the container into the founding object of human civilization—the recipient, the holder, the story. The dinner concept was developed by culinary artists Celine Pelcé and Marente van der Valk, whose staged menu drew from the properties of the container; a meal to be offered, unwrapped, and shared.

Barbara Cooper

Artist Statement

We can read a fluid history of growth embedded in solid form, whether it is in a body, a tree, or geological strata, where the immense scope of a landscape and the history that is literally embedded within it spans an amount of time beyond our comprehension. But growth can also be impeded, intruded upon, deformed and compressed by conflict or lack of resources. And that is where I find my focus now–on the environmental issues facing us today. Developing forms that appear to have grown from the inside out is central to my building process. Contrasting this organic quality of expansion with the constraint that appears to have been imposed externally develops the dichotomy that feels so pervasive in both daily life and the bigger picture of how we inhabit this earth.

Seep_6, 2021, screening, paper pulp, plastic water bottles

Bio

Barbara Cooper works in sculpture, drawing, and public art. Additional projects include gardens and structures for dance and theater. Depending upon the objective of the project, she utilizes diverse media such as wood, metal, paper, glass, and found objects. Manipulating solid material in a fluid manner, forms reference movement and growth. The work is biomorphic in style and process driven, growing from the inside out. Imagery evolves from paring down forms in nature to their essentials, finding common denominators, and eliciting references that blend genres. Utilizing repurposed materials whenever possible, issues of sustainability and an ecology of wholeness are embedded in her work. A graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Cleveland Institute of Art, Cooper’s work is in the collections of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, Honolulu’s Contemporary Museum, and the Illinois State Museum. She has had numerous residencies and fellowships, both in the US and internationally, and has used them as opportunities to research and engage with new environments and geographies. Expanding a vocabulary of forms referencing natural phenomena, Cooper’s work has focused more and more on environmental issues.

https://www.barbaracooperartist.com


Mei-ling Hom & David McClelland

Artist Statement

Artist/farmers Mei-ling Hom and David McClelland make up the collaborative team Art2grow which creates regenerative sculptural installations to improve soil health using fungi, microbes, and plants. Their biodegradable sculptures are bioforms inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi which enhance and remediate distressed soils by boosting the soil’s microbial communities, making nutrients available to the rhizosphere of vascular plants, improving the soil’s water porosity, and even helping to suppress plant pathogens in the soils. Art2grow intends to create a bioform installation amongst the gardens in and around Marble House to improve soil conditions and to provide aesthetic and edible sustenance for the Marble House community. Because the bioforms have a built in senescence, their legacy will bequeath a healthier more robust soil to support future plantings and to feed future Marble House residents

Mei-ling Hom_Fruiting Mushroom Bump_Straw, sisal twine, oyster mushroom spawn_2013_ 15" x 36" x 36" GroDat Youth Farm New Orleans City Park and Joan Mitchell Center This Mushroom Bump made for the GroDat Youth Farm is an example of how fungi respond to different climatic conditions. At our New York State farm these mushrooms could take nine months to a year to fruit, in the humid warmth of the Louisianna Delta our first harvest of mushrooms appeared in two weeks!

Bio

In the midst of busy careers Mei-ling Hom and David McClelland began a challenging and fascinating pursuit of land stewardship when they acquired an overgrown farm as a place to live while Mei-ling pursued her MFA at Alfred University. They had worked together creating and building large sculptural installations including “Floating Mountains Singing Clouds” at the Smithsonian and “Golden Mountain” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Their research skills had been honed through community art projects such as “Picturing Asian America” at the Headlands Center For The Arts, and in a Fulbright Research Fellowship on Contemporary Korean Ceramics in South Korea. As they alternated between city and country they also completed permanent public art commissions in both Philadelphia (Cloudsphere) and Raleigh Durham (Cloudscape) airports. Living and working with growing crops and forests inexorably led to exploring the complicated web of fungi, archaea, bacteria, and green plants which sustain life on this planet. As the collaborative team Art2grow they launched into projects combining aesthetic invention with regenerative growing practices to create living sculptures which become soil amendments and growth stimulants as they pass through their lifecycles. Growing art installations at the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky and the BigCi Art Center in the Blue Mountains of Australia have afforded them extraordinary opportunities to deepen their horticultural knowledge, to create site installations tailored to hyper local conditions, and to establish bonds between art and farming communities.

meilinghom.com


Erin Semine Kökdil

Artist Statement

As an artist, I am often told that you can see yourself in your work. It wasn't until someone told me this, that I started to see the ways that I question my own identity and understanding of the world reflected back to me in the films that I have made. I grew up in-between cultures, with a Turkish father and an American mother, never feeling like I truly fit in. My uncomfortableness in my own skin made me obsessed with the outside world. I loved listening to others' stories, learning about how they became who they were. I never thought this skill of listening, observing, and understanding could translate into a career. Yet after working in the non-profit sector and becoming disillusioned with the power dynamics often involved in international development work, I returned to storytelling. I worked with backstrap weaving collectives in Guatemala, and storytelling was the vehicle I used to introduce these women and their textiles to the international market. After deciding to pursue an MFA in Documentary Film at Stanford to further hone my storytelling craft, I gravitated toward stories of women, culture, loss, and resiliency. Through a participatory approach, my films have illustrated my commitment to partnering with those that I am filming, ensuring that the process is empowering as opposed to depleting. Through patient camerawork, attention to the natural soundscape, and immersion into the character's subjective space, I aim to create films rooted in compassion, that bring up more questions than answers.

Still from Erin Semine Kökdil short's documentary Since you arrived, my heart stopped belonging to me (2021)

Bio

Erin Semine Kökdil is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator interested in building solidarity and inciting social change through film. Her work often deals with issues of migration, identity, and motherhood, and has screened at IDFA, Hot Docs, Camden International Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, AFI Docs, Palm Springs International ShortFest, among others. Her work has been supported by SFFILM, Fulbright, National Geographic, Mountainfilm, and Points North Institute and featured on The New Yorker, KQED, and Means TV. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, she worked extensively with non-profits and community-led initiatives in the U.S. and Guatemala. She holds a BA in Latin American Studies and Spanish from Smith College and an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University. She is the recipient of a 2020 Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship.

www.eskokdil.com


Neel Agrawal & Michael Dwan Singh

Artist Statement

At MarbleHouse, Michael Dwan Singh and Neel Agrawal will embark on their first official collaboration as the Mirasi Collective. Historically, the mirasi were traveling groups of singers and actors; they would carry the news and cultural memory of the societies around them, traveling from village to village. While entertaining the masses, they also functioned as historians, revolutionaries, and even healers. Singh and Agrawal- taking a page from the mirasi playbook- will explore these ideas within the context of the South Asian diasporic sound. They will engage with the writings of older sufi saints (Shah Hussain, Abdul Qadir Jilani, Rabia) and modern poets like Irfan Malik and Amrita Pritam. Comedy and introspection will be the focus as they alchemize written words into musical performances- all under the backdrop of pulsing drum machines, tabla, sarangi, and synth grooves.

Neel Agrawal performing on Young the Giant's "American Bollywood" Tour at The Beacon Theater in New York City, in November 2022.

Bio

Neel Agrawal is a percussionist performing with leading musicians across a wide range of genres, including L. Shankar, Lord Huron, and Young the Giant. Neel received the 2021 COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and was recognized as an inaugural 2018 "Cultural Trailblazer" by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. In 2022, Neel was presented with a Certificate of Recognition by the Mayor of LA, Eric Garcetti, for his initiatives in South Asian arts, education, archives, and advocacy. Additionally, he participated in “Celebrate the Connections”, an urban arts and education tour of India sponsored by the U.S. State Department, and completed a fellowship at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab for his groundbreaking research on African Drumming Laws. Neel was the section leader of the Michigan State University Drumline, where he received two national tenor drumming awards from Percussive Arts Society. He is the Director of Percussion at the Los Angeles International Music and Arts Academy (LAIMA).

www.neelagrawal.com

Michael Dwan Singh is one of a small handful of sarangi players in the US. He comes under the lineage of Ustad Sultan Khan, having studied with his senior student- Dr. Kashyap Dave. Over the past 12 years, he has accompanied classical vocalists, played festivals, and recorded for TV and film. Singh is also a producer and singer, and one half of the electronic duo- The Shadow Notes.

 ashram885.com

Maya Simone Z.

Artist Statement

I am a New York-based interdisciplinary artist with a movement-based practice that centers queer, Black diasporic emotional and spiritual connections between the brain, body and spirit. To explore these connections, my work unearths how (mis)alignments of the self are largely reflected in how our society and governments engage with the water, land and environment around us. My artistry is a means to witness and honor my family’s legacies of farming, Church going, and storytelling. I engage emotional and spiritual knowing that connects the body, ancestral memory, and Black futurity through experimentation and exploration. Mediums I employ include choreography, writing, sound, installation, video, and performance. By interweaving these forms, I cultivate intimate moments that make space for learning/unlearning of embodied trauma by centering joy, pleasure, and liberatory transformations for Black and queer folks. Abolitionist, anti-racist principles guide my collaborative and creative process.

Maya Simone_Waters of Oblivion_performance_2021 Maya Simone kneels before a screen, holding a white bowl, on a reflective surface during a performance of Waters of Oblivion, Dec. 2021.

BIO

Maya Simone Z. is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, choreographer and educator from the South. Their work interweaves movement, writing, sound, installation, video, and performance. They have worked with Sydnie L. Mosley, Jasmine Hearn, Lisa Fagan and Cinthia Chen. Maya has developed and performed in works presented at Green Space, Corkscrew Theater Festival, Theater Mitu and more, including Waters of Oblivion (2020, 2021), the way back (2020), and Give It A Go (2022). Maya Simone has completed residencies with MODArts Dance Collective (NYC), Hambidge Center (GA), Mudhouse Art (Crete, Greece), and GALLIM (NYC). They are currently an Engaging Artists (EA) Fellow with More Art and 2022 artist-in-residence with the FloodNet Deluge program at NYU Tandon. With support from More Art and the FloodNet Deluge program, they are currently developing an oral history collection and archiving project titled state of water: brooklyn waterfronts, centering experiences of NYC residents in relationship to water, city infrastructure, and flooding. They will also share a work during More Art’s public programming for Fred Wilson’s installation Mind Forged Manacles, Manacles Forged Minds in spring 2023.