Following her commissioned site-specific installation NETWORK for the Menil Drawing Institute, Marcia Kure continues to explore the complex histories of trade and migration through painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage. Through abstraction, Kure asks how visible and invisible structures can be dissolved into line.
Reticulation investigates our shared responsibility in perpetuating networks of migration and exchange. Kure uses line as mark, metaphor, memory, and systems tracker. Using natural pigment—indigo and kola nut—the artist places pressure on the material components of her drawings as commodities that map the movement of bodies through time. Here Kure references the curvilinear shape of the Uli line, a Nigerian design motif traditionally drawn on the body. Treating surface as skin, these marks become a site of remembrance, holding within them histories of colonization and exploitation.