ABOUT

From the late 1980s to the early 1990s Marian started painting anonymous figures with flat patterned backgrounds and often patterning on the figure but without form or material folds. An interest in patterns and particularly in non-conforming, variable patterns led her into printmaking in the mid 1990s, where she printed in intaglio-type or silkscreen to create single units, vary them in colour and then assembling them into larger pieces with variation throughout.

Patterns and ornament then became a large part of her commercial design work from 2004–2019. These themes, along with custom-made typography (including typographic systems that also work as variable patterning) are what made her famous in the design world and resulted in the publication of two books by Thames & Hudson. I Wonder, an “illuminated manuscript” of essays and experimental design was published in 2010 (shortlisted for the British Design of the Year award in 2011), with an expanded paperback edition published in 2018. Marian’s extensive monograph of work, Pretty Pictures, was published in 2013 (named one of the best 20 art books in the past 20 years by BookForum).

In 2018 Marian began working on her “sticker paintings” which use mass-produced stickers (most of them vintage) to create patterned allegories. As patterns, her work had always been edgeless, but in 2020 she became interested in the idea of “figure/ground” in the form of the vase: an eternal and near-universal depiction in art.

Working in mixed media on large (42” x 52”) sheets of paper, Marian painted seven vase paintings in which the vase is always flat black representing a void or absence-of-vase, but out of which comes a series of abstract, ornamental forms. In 2022 she returned to the sticker paintings to create more vase forms in that medium.

At the beginning of 2023 Marian started working with the AI program Midjourney, and soon discovered its ability to generate many multiples of the “same” but different things, and understood it as the next step in her exploration of patterns and ornament that varies throughout. She continues to use the vase-void as a grounding point for the emanations, which are digital “collages” made of hundreds of AI generated images.