Marion  Roope

Artist Statement

My current work that I am doing reflects on environmental concerns and addresses our relationship to the natural world as we perceive it and interact with it. Society have become increasingly disconnected from nature. My work centres around a general theme of the colours of nature.

 I do this mainly from rust making and dyeing to found objects being plant life and fallen leaves, these objects are foraged in my local park at the back of my house and my well stocked back garden.

My desire is to use the collected items and the natural dying as a movement to be more mindful of how we live and how we connect with each other around the place where we live and what is close at hand. The process that I use is  contact printing, transferring images onto watercolour paper, this is a very simple process of pressing the plant life or flowers between layers of paper. The image transfer requires you to bundle or wrap the plant life together, in my case I wrap my plant life around rusted recycled tins, secured with string tightly which results in better image transfer. The bundle is then boiled or steamed in water or a dye bath to release the colours and images of the plant life materials onto the paper.

I want to work creatively with what is easily available or close at hand, and to be imaginative with what I can gather in my surroundings making art that shows the natural world today through foraged and scavenged items giving them rebirth. Outcomes can be unpredictable most of the techniques that I use will be found objects that represent a link to the places I have been and the fact that I found it on one of my walks and decided to pick it up, to use it to record an experience of the place I am walking.