In the work of Marcia Kure – spanning drawing, collage, pigment and assemblage – inscription functions as a structural event, rendering histories, ecologies and systems of value legible. In her vocabulary, plant-based pigments, mineral extractions, carbon residues and petrochemical synthetics reveal how natural and industrial worlds co-produce one another. Her engagement with indigo, kola nut, charcoal and gold forms a matrix within which inscription occurs. For her, pigments and minerals possess conceptual force, illuminating social and material entanglements.
Kure’s Hair Jackets are assemblages that incorporate synthetic hair – a product that implicates extractive industries, gendered labour and aesthetic economies – and carved wood. The synthetic hair functions as a filament of inscription: strands operate as lines, braids as circuits, and layered densities as sedimented traces of infrastructural pressure. The Hair Jackets serve as spatial registers of the forces that inform Kure’s drawings: accumulation, compression, entanglement, and the ongoing reconfiguration of systems acting upon lived environments.
For Kure, drawing becomes a means of apprehending the world. The line operates not as a contour or boundary, but as an analytic that models how economic, ecological, technological and epistemic infrastructures shape contemporary life. Kure reveals how marks operate as agents of knowledge, how materials retain and transmit epistemic depth, and how surfaces register the convergence of ecological, economic and technological trajectories.
—Jareh Das with Marcia Kure
