My name is Margot. This is the name I have chosen. I was born on July 25, 1982 and grew up in the countryside. At first, I tried to do like everyone else. I learnt a job, florist, and then I became a business manager. “All was well in the best of all worlds”.
But my future was to be different. The year 2014 was a radical change in the way I see life, my future, and how I was going to use my energy. One cycle ended, another began. I stopped my work. Back to the family home. It’s an upheaval. I changed my route, I forked. I stopped everything. My subconscious knew that my future was somewhere else.
When I was 32 years old, in October 2014, I started drawing tirelessly. Everyday. All day. This energy was like a torrent, indeed it was frenetic and furious.
With time, I have found my rhythm. I multiply the features and I give birth to the forms. Then I assemble the curves with fluidity. A rhythmic is created, similar to music, to emotions. With the help of multiple pieces of paper, I build architectures, similar to shelters, a cabin in a tree, where my mind can retreat.I come to calm my thoughts on the world around me: inviolable territory where only the protectors of my sanctuary take root.
Through my drawings, I compose with the vibrations surrounding me, I give birth to a new universe and I transcend my memories. I free myself, I break my chains. I breathe ………. deeply.
— Margot
The work of Margot (b. 1982) provides access to a profoundly interesting interior world. Self-taught as an artist, her pictures are a compelling synthesis of bold compositional structure and complex pictorial web of detail into which viewers are enticed and invited to lose themselves in imaginative wanderings. As such, Margot’s pictures speak clearly from a distance and, whether large or small in scale, they are enveloping close up. They are at once like the decorated facades of great, spiritual buildings and the packed, illuminated pages of ancient books. Within the architecture of the overall composition there is teeming life jostling cheek by jowl, displaying a horror vacui that is characteristic of much mediumistic, visionary and outsider art, from the likes of Augustin Lésage and Madge Gill, to Alex Grey and Adolf Wölfli.
In 2014, she started drawing compulsively. It was a sudden thing that was hard to explain, but which she thinks was likely the beginning of releasing everything that had been stored inside for years. A kind of visionary outpouring of inner images. Margot’s technique is intuitive and based on automatic processes, with images bubbling up, as it were, from inner depths, or some cosmic realm not usually accessible to everyday consciousness. These are not formless or sprawling works, though. There is a balance here between intuition and conscious intention that ensures visual cohesion. Margot has described herself as a “catalyst” and says that when she works, “Everything happens naturally. There is no distinct intention in doing such and such a thing.” Fluidity and hybridity are important expressive qualities here. She invokes Aldous Huxley’s famous dictum that, “If the doors of perception were cleaned, each thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Objects that are in a state of flux and constant becoming offer imaginative access to the universal whole. “I believe that the doors are our bodies,” says Margot, “and that we shouldn’t restrict ourselves to the boundaries of our bodies. We are much more.”
Colin Rhodes
Collections:
ABCD Collection, Paris
