Marine Lefebvre

My work is composed of analogue print, sculpture and installation to create personal utopian spaces. They are the result of reinterpretations of environments I experience. By aiming to make visible a place’s memory, I create a new dreamed space. I mentally assemble elements I have collected, drawings, images, colours and shapes to compose ideal landscapes. They invite to intimate projections.

Layering colours and drawings, and playing with scales in the images and in the installations, build up depth
and strangeness. To produce illusion, I use materials and technics in a way that the viewer do not recognise them. I let surprises happen by playing with mistakes. My work balances between illustration and abstraction, reality and dream. In order to create tension between these different aspects, the spaces are narrative and theatrical.

The space I want to depict is natural, however, evidence of human actions are visible. The images are composed in
a way that they are fragments of a wide space, a mental space. I am interested in what kind of natural environment are left on earth, and our relation to nature. This relation can be idealised, forgotten, false... By creating utopian natural spaces, which do not exist, I question this relation. The natural elements and the familiar ones are drawn in a way that the viewer does not identify them, they are left open to personal interpretation. They are put in unusual relations to each other to create an uncanny feeling.