Marly Merle: Touching, over and over

I meet with Marly 5 months into her twelve-month fellowship, at a stage in which her dedicated studio space is filled with sketches, swatches, maquettes, technical drawings and trials, large and small. She layers and folds and hangs and gathers and dismantles and traces and copies and stacks, arranging and rearranging as she goes. As the months go by, the studio becomes increasingly filled with the fallout of experimentation, unshackled from the requirements of an overarching conceptual narrative. She knows this side of things will come, in its own time.

She has become particularly taken with OSB (Oriented strand board), a type of engineered composite wood panelling made from bonded layers of compressed, shredded flakes of wood. Used primarily in the construction industry, it is a no-nonsense material – cheap, strong and practical. It has Marly hooked. It is partly the fact that it is such an unremarkable, everyday material that it is easy to overlook. But also that there’s a poetry to the fact that it is a material formed of small fragments: its strength is dependent on its internal multiplicity. And you can see why Marly might be drawn to the highly manufactured and transformative process of shredding and bonding with adhesive, resin and extreme heat in OSB production. The resulting texture of OSB – unique and unpredictable – has been a catalyst for a host of her materially-focused experiments. She has used it for stencils of various sizes and shapes; she has scanned it, digitised it; and, through engraving, embossing and rubbing, imprinted its textural makeup like camouflage on other materials such as resin, paper, tin foil or Perspex. She is driven by the potential of surface and transfer, of how the qualities of one physical material might be rendered in another. She seeks out methods and capacities for transformation by following her attachments to tactile qualities – sheen, opacity, reflectivity and porosity, pliability.

Much of her artwork through the fellowship has been process and material led, so too has her teaching practice. Through her gradual accrual of new technical expertise, and the time granted to better understand her new approach to making art, she has devised workshops for students that are specifically designed to facilitate greater engagement with technical and material processes. She has looked to demystify technical methods, encourage the development of productive relationships with technicians, and build the students’ confidence by expanding their skillsets and sharing with them her own excitement for the possibilities of physical making. In turn, the development and delivery of this teaching has given Marly clarity over her own artistic methods: she can now identify a structure of logical development and reflection emerging in what she might once have thought of as solely intuitive. This is the epitome of practice-led teaching, where teaching and arts practice are fully integrated and mutually informing. 

Her method is an accumulation of various processes of transference and translation. She begins by isolating fragments of typography drawn from her collection of ephemera: gallery handouts, posters, discarded envelopes gathered over the years. She prints these and then fragments them, resulting in splintered corners and edges – parts of phrases, parts of words, parts of single letters – to the point where they become entirely unreadable, an uncrackable code. The resulting forms, New Symbols she calls them, are a curious graphic cross between Art Deco and Sci-fi: scimitars? Leaf-like formations? Hilts? Glyphs? There is a pre- (post-?) verbal language developing here, one that Marly translates and retranslates – not to understand it better, but to remove it further from herself and the possibilities of all-knowing control and comprehension – trusting that something unanticipated might emerge. De-translation then? She photocopies, scans, blows up, reduces, folds, rubs and piles material iterations of her New Symbols. Here, several are laser cut and then stacked, arising like miniature contoured mountains; there, she has digitally imprinted and carved away rows of her symbols from large panels of Perspex or wood, in giant stencils. Elsewhere, she lines up multiple semi-transparent aquamarine glass-like talismans, again in the form of her New Symbols. Each individual symbol is the same form repeated. There must be 50 or so of them; small, each one would fit comfortably in your hand. They are laid out so that one partially overlaps the next, like segments of a disassembled clementine, amplifying their unity through dismembered multiplicity. They stretch out along a medicalised-looking silver metal tray, which renders their transparencies more apparent. Jewel-like, they glow.

Lizzie Lloyd is a Bristol-based art writer and researcher. She is Co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Art and Writing (Intellect) and Senior Lecturer at UWE Bristol.