Conversations with Marina Claire

Today we’d like to introduce you to Marina Claire.

Hi Marina, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story? 
I was born at a very young age. A few years later, I started drawing animals. My mom turned one of my drawings of a dog into a stuffed animal. Seeing my idea of a dog popped out into something I could grab and play with, I witnessed idea transubstantiation. The lines of particulars (my portrait of our dog) became a 3d cloth archetype (from crayon to embroidered textiles) and taught that individual things contain throughlines of universal ideals. 

Materiality and creation have always itched an existential scratch. Making comics of fantasy warriors reenacting personal conflicts and copying famous paintings on the Etch-A-Sketch helped me sit quietly for hours each week in the church pews. I didn’t have many friends growing up and spent a lot of time in my backyard digging holes, melting toys, testing the removal properties of acetone, making short films about my troll collection, and dramatized household chores. 

In my teens, I started to spend more time in museums than church, where conceptual art and minimalism were a big deal to me — Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper, Sol LeWitt, and Carl Andre. I developed a taste for work that served to strip away anything that could be doubted or denied, doing away with bits that could be considered “extra,” boiling an object down to its essence, essential function, or form. Art that embodies Truth that’s what I craved and sought. For the same reasons, I was drawn to pre-Socratics in community college as a teen: Parmenides and Heraclitus, the paths of Being vs. Becoming. There’s this idea popular among early recorded thought that either everything that exists always has existed (‘Being’), or things change and thus at one point did not exist (‘Becoming’). I am interested in art that, by its very nature, its structure reveals meaning. 

I took a gap year in Wisconsin and learned to weld. I moved to New York for school, where I lived and worked for ten years. During my time there, I felt torn between the stark classism of the fine art world in contrast to the needs and struggles of the communities around me. I worked for myself, some cultural institutions, and nonprofits, tattooed to make rent, and developed some substance abuse habits. I studied with Katja Strunz in Berlin and explored a language of sculpture that compressed space and time, collapsing here and there, now and then. 

In Portland, Oregon, I found myself in a community of artisans and ex-cons at a makerspace called Past Lives, where I worked as a Project and Operations Manager. There, I expanded my art welding practice to include fabrication and became a certified welder, working on more structural projects and training teams. Industrial design has proven a great conduit to continue my points of interest and inquiry. How might a steel handrail, as one holds it while walking up the stairs, encourage thinking about the nature of perfectly straight lines that never end? 

Today, I am sitting at an easel in my home studio in East Hollywood, fielding calls about a commercial residential installation in North Portland. My current body of work features painted studies of my geometric sculptures. The paintings highlight the subtle dimensionality of rod steel and 2D-3D interplay when the forms are flattened, as in a photograph. For the space in between canvases, I occasionally fabricate exhibition displays, teach, and work remotely for Past Lives. I help project managers learn how to build and coordinate custom moss board signs for local companies, install and maintain structures at bouldering gyms like crash pads and wall texture, and how to estimate steel fabrication for the occasional table, handrail, or bespoke swizzle stick request. 

We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
In 2020, I checked myself into rehab for substance abuse and moved across the country to uphold a lifestyle change to recovery. In order to embody my own universal-particular ideal, I needed a paradigm shift. I had tried unsuccessfully to get sober on my own. There’s a reason for the common saying in recovery circles: “The opposite of addiction is connection.” I use work and materiality to connect with others. It’s been challenging working alongside other people in recovery. It’s always painful to witness a relapse in a cohort and even more painful to place and enforce boundaries. But ultimately, it’s gratifying to see someone overcome a challenge, take on more responsibility, and strive for improvement together. “Progress, not perfection.” 

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
As an artist who loves welding, painting, tattooing, and managing operations, I am constantly working with physical materials. It’s fascinating to me how ideas take shape in the material world. I draw inspiration from Plato, who talked about universal concepts like geometry that he believed to be timeless. My goal is to create art that makes people think about how we can connect the conceptual world with our everyday experiences. 

Plato’s ideas about the perfection of geometric shapes and how they might be the building blocks of everything in nature really inspire me. So, even though I know my art will never be perfect (it has uneven angles and wonky lines and will erode over time), I still strive to create objects that push our minds toward perfection. My imperfect creations encourage people to contemplate the space between ideas and reality, between the conceptual and the physical. 

In this dance between the abstract and the concrete, I explore form, structure, and existence. Every line, angle, and intersection in my geometric compositions is a deliberate effort to capture the universal essence found in our physical world. For example, how is it possible that hexagonal molecules of ink can be drawn into a two-dimensional octahedron on a shoulder, and how does that octahedron pull one into thinking about how that crystalline shape aligns one’s skin with diamonds and fluorite? Or imagine a steel hexahedron sculpture hanging from the ceiling, casting shadows that stretch and dance across the room. It hints at perfection, but its position purposely introduces imperfections, making us oscillate between different possibilities. 

My art wants to hold viewers in that space between reality and imagination, allowing them to experience the materiality of the artwork while also sensing the potential perfection from which it emerges. 

So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
I experience pain intensely, as all humans do, and I want to celebrate hurt as it defines relief and joy, to recognize the importance of angst and frustration, as without them, we would not know purpose, meaning, or belonging. Making things has been both a celebration of creation itself and a way of connecting to people and places around me. Learning and becoming proficient in a procedure, nurturing that ability, and sharing it to the benefit of others is one of the things that makes life worth living. I aim to continue personal expansion and development to the end of connection. I recognize my personal divinity, skills, and imperfect perfection and want to employ these traits to enhance the personal divinity, skills, and imperfect perfection of others. 

Contact Info:

• Website: marina-claire.com
• Instagram: triplemastectomy
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marina-x-1452052a2/

Image Credits
David Anthony Ortiz

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