Marine One
London, UK (Remote Work) | April 2025
Link to the text on Marine’s website here.
This was a freelance commission executed remotely after a Zoom call session.
“We had a really lovely chat about my overall practice to get an idea of what my statement could look like. I’ve had the same one on my website for years, though it read a bit generic and didn’t feel detailed enough to reflect my diverse practice now.
Yulin asked all the right questions to tease out the essence of my work - offering some connections/revelations I never made before! It was great to get another in-depth perspective from a fellow artist in this process and receive a concise and vibrant piece of writing at the end - now I feel more confident in my online presence when I share my contacts with potential new connections.
Overall I had fun and I liked how flexible Yulin was with the tone/format and tight turn-around time for the application I was submitting in a few days. Thanks again!” —— Marine
First Draft:
To capture an audience through a playful unease is pivotal to my practice. Sewing together stuffed limbs, bulging eyes, and common foodstuffs skewed for one’s viewing pleasure, I orchestrate imposing set-ups to pull wandering eyes into a critical awakening.
The deeper societal issues around toxic masculinity and the objectification of women is a shared matter amongst both Japanese and Western cultures. Having traversed across both worlds, I have been exposed to everyday people who have lived their entire lives without yet confronting their warped understanding of gender roles and stereotypes that are so ingrained in their psyche.
To challenge this, I stage my installations to provoke the viewer into waking from their personal versions of this ‘sleep’, no matter how cognisant they feel they already are. A deliberate uncanniness is fabricated through juxtapositions of the unfamiliar-familiar with images mined from accessible online image banks or my own family archives. This stitched tension is decisively non-violent: soft, welcoming fabrics are chosen for the tactile sense of the image, elevating its two or three dimensional stand-in.
Whether it is a towering macho-man-head-torso in a business suit or strange, fluffy humanoid creatures adorned with pinned bows to be held in the hand, my spontaneous conceptions are immersive invitations to an eerie party that delivers a lingering presence in the brain: feminine, masculine, both, neither - actively dwelling long after its first touch. This charged interplay between my work and the viewer is what captivates me to keep making, as I continue to wake.
Final Version with the Artist’s Edits (using her own words/vocabulary):
Capturing an audience through playful unease is pivotal to my practice. Sewing together stuffed limbs, bulging eyes, and common foodstuffs skewed for viewing pleasure, I orchestrate unnerving scenes to pull wandering eyes into a strange awakening.
Toxic masculinity and the objectification of women are shared societal illnesses amongst both Japanese and Western cultures. Having traversed both worlds, I am fascinated with the gendered stereotypes that are ingrained so deeply in many of us. I have felt and seen how these ideas creep their way into the human psyche like carbon monoxide. For many of us, it’s easier to leave the poison unaddressed.
To explore and challenge this, I stage my installations to provoke the viewer into waking from their personal versions of this ‘sleep’, no matter how cognisant they feel they already are. A deliberate uncanniness is fabricated through juxtapositions of the unfamiliar-familiar with images mined from accessible online image banks or my own family archives. This stitched tension is decisively non-violent: soft, welcoming fabrics are chosen for the tactile sense of the image, elevating its two or three dimensional stand-in.
Whether it is a towering macho-man-head-torso in a business suit or strange, fluffy humanoid creatures adorned with pinned bows to be held in the hand, my conceptions are immersive invitations to an eerie party that delivers a lingering presence in the brain: feminine, masculine, both, neither - actively dwelling long after their first touch. This charged interplay between my work and the viewer is what captivates me to keep making, as I continue to wake.