The intention or motivation behind the artworks is to give expression to its inner experience.

The textural diversity of Marieke Russel’s oeuvre is a testament to her intuitive, insightful art making approach. Marieke allows her materials and her subjects to guide her, seeing herself as the skilled conduit through which a mythical visual world arises. Her extensive oeuvre shows its own inner experience and cannot simply be categorized. This work is mostly philosophic, symbolic and of a mystic nature. Her textile art become born frequently intuitively, without ideas and the solutions are often unexpected. By low on low introducing, to arise several colour areas and forms interesting compositions. These colorful tapestries have a fluid, ephemeral quality, echoing the harmoniousness of Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

Inspired by her love of dance, puppetry and theatre, Marieke Russel’s art invokes wholly original worlds through an impressively wide variety of media, including delicate bronze sculptures, tapestries, marionettes, dolls and domestic furnishings. A pastoral theme suffuses her work, evoking images of the forest as a place of childhood mystery. She also forges a strong link between the visual and tactile arts and fables, folktales and myths. The use of winged creatures as symbols of hope is pervasive, as is the mythology of motherhood, family, birth and accepting the inevitability of death, all presented as experiences which bear the supernatural in them.

Angels, as well as dragonflies with human bodies, are foundations in her work, as representatives of hope as well as melancholy. Despite her work’s consistent themes of the otherworldly and the ethereal, however, Marieke’s sensitive reappraisal of this realm also speaks to its implications for those of us in the material world. Marieke is not a fantasist, but an artist who brings primal emotions to the surface via the content of myth, fable and the tumult of childhood. She re-tells ancient stories and presents them to us afresh. Through the pathos of innocence, as well as with a generous understanding of the human condition, Marieke Russel speaks to us from the other side.