Studio Fellows: Marly Merle

A deep-dive into the experience of a Fellow at Bath School of Art.

For multidisciplinary artist Marly Merle, the Freelands Studio Fellowship at Bath Spa University has been an open invitation to unlearn habits and reimagine process. Within the university’s network of workshops, technicians, and students, her practice has taken on a new elasticity – experimenting with readily available tools, embracing the thrill of unpolished ideas taking shape, and allowing play to become a method for growing research, community and materiality.

Working alongside students has reimagined what her practice can hold: not a finished thing, but an evolving ecosystem of collaboration, curiosity, care, risk, and joyful invention across new and familiar materials. Here, the university is not just a backdrop but an active participant in her practice; a testing ground for ideas and experimentation. Marly’s Fellowship becomes an evolving site of learning itself – messy, generous, and alive with possibility.

It gives me space from my practice doing the teaching. I have times where it kind of gives me that head space to then come back and have fresh ideas...

Marly Merle

About the artist

Marly Merle’s interdisciplinary practice moves between architectural and bodily landscapes, shaped by sculptural gestures that echo garments, furniture, and structural forms. Through layered combinations, she creates hybrid forms that blur the boundaries of function and fiction. Works invite slow attention, drawing viewers into shifting inner worlds where meaning remains fluid and transformation is a constant.

Employing an intuitive, process-led approach, Marly Merle reconfigures fragments gathered from places with quiet, residual potential. She explores their embedded histories to imagine alternative pasts or speculative futures. Tactile processes like stitching, layering, and joining remain visible, allowing the act of making to reorient materials into forms that feel both fragile and composed.

About the film

This film is part of a series of shorts spotlighting the artist's experience during their year-long 2025 Freelands Studio Fellowship. The films examine and archive the impact of being an artist in residence at an art school. Each explore the impact of having a studio practice in a context of learning, teaching and making alongside faculty, students and a new local arts ecosystem.

Filmed, edited and captioned by Pete Telfar.

With thanks to Bath Spa University.