SEOUL.- White Cube Seoul is presenting ‘DUST’ by Marguerite Humeau, marking the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Asia. Comprising new sculptures, photography and works on paper, the works in the presentation visualise the unseen natural forces involved in the mechanics of space and time. Animating dust as a key protagonist in an operatic milieu, Humeau takes this overlooked matter and imbues it with meaning – as symbolic of the interconnected forces of life and death, and carrier of multitudinous temporalities.

The works featured in ‘DUST’ continue a line of inquiry originating in Humeau’s major land artwork ‘Orisons’ (2023), which takes place in a single 160-acre fallow crop circle in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. In so doing, ‘Orisons’ situates one artist’s concerns within the greater scheme of the persistence and resilience of life, between the rolling sand dunes driven by a consistent eastward wind, the drama of the horizon and expansive open sky, the remains of animal bones and nomadic weeds. In recognition of this unique site teeming with life and layered histories, Humeau sought to devise an ephemeral artistic intervention that would at the same time celebrate the land as artwork in and of itself.

Through an extensive period of research and close collaboration with local farmers, geomancers, conservation experts, a wildlife refuge, foragers, ornithologists and indigenous communities, Humeau discovered the San Luis Valley of the past and of the present: an area now afflicted by aridification due to climate change. ‘Orisons’ is the ancient word for prayer, and as a gesture of reparation between human and land the artist created sculptural, divination instruments informed by the native wildlife, each placed at strategic ‘activation points’ across the site and then detailed in a map along with other locations of interest. This visitor guidance map – which conceptually interfaces past, present and speculative futures – commemorates, for example, the migratory path taken by ancestral nomads, the upkeep of an Artesian well, and the dead bird that Humeau herself found and buried while working there.

For ‘DUST’, Humeau has created a series of intricate sculptures that visualise the activation points of ‘Orisons’ as spacetime portals. Through compositions that combine an array of materials – including copper wire, bronze and glass, unglazed terracotta, onyx and organza – the complexly enmeshed histories of ‘Orisons’ take three-dimensional form. Works such as release of gravity, extraction pipes, the twist and the guardian of Earth migrations (all 2024) describe this with sweeping curves and ascending coils, and tumid, clustered threads suggestive of roiling masses of energy. Funnelling upwards in cyclonic formation, their forms invoke the scientific modelling of elemental forces, as well as art historical depictions of the spiritual.

In cattleguard (2024), a bustling network of roots branches over reproductions of prehistoric cattle figurines. Here, the animal becomes a cipher of human empathy: conduits of the ineffable and intermediaries between natural and supernatural realms. Similarly, Humeau’s work the disappearance of the bird (2024) considers the idea of living beings in relation to portals, referring directly to a moment of personal significance during the installation of ‘Orisons’. The sculpture, comprising thick blocks of biocompatible rubber and fine-spun silk, stages the quiet, self-initiated bird burial as profound, celestial event. Ideas of history, event and the vast reaches of time are also at work in dead skins (2024), which immortalises the form of a husk of foliage in blown glass. Appearing fossilised, Humeau has taken an arrested moment of decay and transformed it into an occasion of funerary celebration. The sculptures are presented in the Seoul gallery on iridescent steel structures that have been treated with zinc passivation, suggestive of a transmutation that is chemical as much as it is emotional.

Developed in tandem with the sculptures, a suite of works on paper engage with whirling, centrifugal energies through layers of watered-down pigment. Titled ‘a circular landscape as an access to the nets of spacetime’, this new series of works on paper offers another means by which the artist has visualised unseen presences. Evoking diverse techniques of image-making, such as spirit photography or automatic drawing, Humeau once more endeavours to render visible that which cannot be seen, positing that intuition and memory can be inscribed through the gestural marking of paper. The final component of the exhibition are photographs taken by Julia Andréone and Florine Bonaventure at the site of ‘Orisons’ during the artist’s time there, some printed in large format and others small. This play with scale draws our attention to the way in which life forms are dwarfed by the immensity of their environments, linking the great temporal cycles that engender life to humbler phenomena, whether human, soil or dust.

Marguerite Humeau (b.1986, Cholet, France) lives and works in London. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2011. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2021); Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2019); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2019); New Museum, New York (2018); Tate Britain, London (2017); Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, Switzerland (2017); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2017); Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2016); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016). Humeau’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London (2024); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2021); the Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); MAMVP, Paris (2019); the High Line, New York (2017); Château de Versailles, France (2017); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2017); FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, France (2017); Serpentine Galleries, London (2014); and Victoria and Albert Museum, Sculpture Gallery, London (2014). Humeau’s work was included in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani and the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (both 2022). In 2023, Humeau created the 160-acre earthwork ‘Orisons’ in San Luis Valley, Colorado, one of the largest earthworks ever produced by a solo female artist. It was curated and produced by Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, headquartered in Denver.