Marie Mueller Priqueler

French visual artist and writer Marie Muller Priqueler works between London and France. Marie’s work is inspired by her passion for phytotherapy and philosophy. Marie’s work asks the question, how does it feel to exist as a woman in a phallocentric, patriarchal society? Marie creates her work as an attempt to separate sexuality from politics and capitalism. The work resists being categorized, showing the ephemeral and spiritual nature of Marie’s photography.

In the creating of La Vitalité Hybride – Deterioration, Marie creates her own “gaze”. Moving away from the attention of self-image, Marie instead focuses on the contradictory inner conversations had within herself about her body. Marie’s intention is to step away from attention to her own self-image and instead turn the conversation to a dialogue that is ambivalent regarding her body as a metaphysical structure. La Vitalité Hybride – Deterioration makes connections between women from a biological standpoint to the sexuality of women. The relationship between women’s confidence, their sensuality, and their body is explored.

Throughout the series, Marie uses her body as the main subject, exploring her own experience with using plants medicinally, specifically for hormonal dysfunction caused by years of hormonal birth control. The images are printed on hand made, seeded paper. The handmade paper draws a clear line to the use of phytotherapy. The printed medium acts as a counterweight against the use of artificial hormones. Marie uses her own body as a vessel, exploring it as “a mutable and woundable thing, as a broken but mended object, testing the limits of social orders and taboos.” Plants that grow from the prints on seeded paper, from images of human flesh are a representation of the damage, change, and rebirth of a body negatively affected by hormonal birth control.

The seeded paper gives a unique look to the photos, as if they are a non-traditional or historical printing process. The images themselves are a combination of ambiguous and obvious subject matter. Many of the images in the series ask the questions, are they a landscape, are they a body part, are they some kind of object?