Marguerite Humeau has the curiosity of a child, the sensitivity of a poet, and the technical precision of a surgeon. The London-based French sculptor is bringing this potent combination to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, where her first large-scale museum show in the United States will see the light this winter.
Humeau is best known for collaborating with all manner of experts—anthropologists, ornithologists, even clairvoyants—to make art that conjures the ancient past or imagines the distant future. In one of her earliest works, she recreated the voice box of Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s. Last year, she installed more than 80 kinetic sculptures across a 160-acre expanse of the San Luis Valley in Colorado. It was one of the largest land artworks ever created by a female artist.
The time Humeau spent in that drought-stricken Colorado landscape helped inspire the Miami exhibition “\*sk\*/ey-,” which opens Dec. 3. “It got me thinking about what forms of life can actually exist in this world,” Humeau says. Watching the wind push tumble weeds across the desert and whip dust into roving clouds, the artist began imagining a speculative future where “we have to become creatures of the air.” This line of inquiry, she reasoned, would be especially relevant for a show in Florida, which is a key thoroughfare for migratory birds.
Footage she shot in Colorado forms the basis for a new video that envisions what it might look like for life to leave an uninhabitable Earth behind and become airborne. (The score, by MARUSKES—Lida Brouskari and Tania Zountsa's experimental project—and featuring a contribution by composer and clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, is unsurprisingly heavy on the wind instruments.)
In the next gallery, a trio of sculptures appears to emerge from the ground like forest zombies. Another group of sculptures, perched high on the wall, look like winged creatures poised to take flight. Their surfaces resemble those of surreal creatures in a Leonora Carrington painting, rippled and otherworldly.
As part of her research, Humeau convened a group of textile designers for more than a month to experiment with treating felt and organza silk in ways that evoke mold and dead skin. “I wanted them to feel like they are alive, that they’ve grown from the soil,” Humeau says of her new sculptures. “They are in a state of becoming.”
