MARIE LAFOREY LUMEN SERIES

Marie Laforey is a self-taught artist based in New York, US who maintains a sustainable art practice using primarily organic material. Laforey enjoys the tactility of working with organic mediums and learning how to craft preserved moss, clay, feathers and other natural elements into beautiful abstract compositions. Primarily inspired by nature, repetition, patterns, the particularity of texture and geometry are essential elements that are omnipresent in her works. About the Lumen series: With Lumen, Marie Laforey advances straw marquetry into territory that feels at once ancestral and startlingly contemporary, treating the medium less as craft than as a language of luminance. Her compositions unfold across a disciplined grid before quietly subverting it through diagonals, chevrons, and shifting basket-weave rhythms that recall the serial rigor of Agnes Martin and the chromatic architectures of Josef Albers, filtered through the parquetry traditions of seventeenth-century French interiors. Yet where Albers asked color to perform the optical work, Laforey asks the fiber itself to carry the weight of light, each strand of straw laid with such precision that orientation, not pigment, becomes the true subject. Stand still before one of these panels and it darkens; shift a few degrees and it ignites, as though the surface were exhaling illumination back at the viewer. Her geometry is exacting yet never austere, softened by the organic irregularities of each filament that refuse the cold finality of the rule. Lumen ultimately proposes that light is not something to be depicted but something to be constructed, angle by angle, gesture by gesture, and the work lingers in the eye long after one has left the room. Marie Laforey’s works have been placed into various private collections in the US and in corporate and hospitality facilities. She is represented by the Muriel Guépin Gallery in New York City, USA.