Marielle Hehir Greater Manchester, United Kingdom

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Painter/Maker

Hehir’s practice explores the relationship between painting and place. Specifically, ways in which contemporary painting might address the materiality of land in the context of the present climate crisis. Hehir finds stimulus for her work whist spending time with the British canal network – she lives on a narrowboat and has travelled extensively around the inland waterways. For Hehir, the canal is an ‘edgeland’ which exists at the intersection of natural, wild land and land which is managed and built upon. Hehir finds that through her lived engagement with place at a slowed pace, connections and understandings are nurtured. Through close, sustained looking, the vibrancy of the materiality of the canal reveals itself. Hehir is interested in the spirit, or genius loci of the canal network, and through her practice she explores how an experience of place can be evoked and remembered. In the studio, Hehir utilises an extensive collection of materials, including earth and synthetic materials which might be found at the canal. Through a process of intention and accident, Hehir creates surfaces in her work which are often fragile and precarious, or distressed in some way; surfaces which are evocative of the increasingly unstable land-surface terrain of the Anthropocene. Luminous yet melancholy, Hehir’s work is as much about loss as it is about speculation for the future. Slowly unfurling through prolonged looking, Hehir’s artworks become spaces permeated by hope and care, haunted by grief, yet anticipating what has not yet become.