Over the past year, Marie Muller Priqueler has been making a body of work that attempts to detach sexuality from politics and capitalism. This idealistic effort characterises the spiritual and ephemeral nature of her work and its resistance to categorisation. In this collection of works, Marie questions the accepted photographic print to investigate her body as a mutable and woundable thing, as a broken but mended object, testing the limits of social orders and taboos.
I’m challenging definitions of photography, self-portraiture, modelling, and writing, and I am fighting to cast off established classifications by refusing to fit anywhere. Using my own body as my main medium, I am exploring the inner-workings of the female psyche, female sensuality, and female intimacy. My work attempts to evade ‘narcissistic’ attention to my self image, pursuing instead a more ambivalently dialogical relationship to such along to the metaphysical dimensions of my body.
By photographing details of my body printed onto seeded plant based handmade paper, I’m exploring my recent experience with the use of plants to treat hormonal dysfunction. Indeed, researches as shown that the body, mind, and menstrual cycle are unable to work properly and independently after a long period of chemical contraception ingestion, and that the daily intake of artificial hormone is carcinogenic for women. The plants that grow from photographs of my flesh are the illustration of the deterioration, metamorphosis, and then rebirth of a physical and psychic body damaged by ingested products. Here then appears the symbiosis between nature and the material body in my work, and the creation of my own ‘bodysystem’.
