In Marguerite Humeau’s Artworks, Rare Lifeforms Survive the Climate Apocalypse

Marguerite Humeau imagines worlds in which the climate crisis has caused new kinds of creatures to alarmingly evolve. Her current exhibition at the ICA in Miami, which is being installed as she speaks to me by Zoom from a hallway in the museum, is called “\*sk\*/ey-,” a word she says comes from an ancient term for shedding and splitting. Through film and sculptures, the artist adds, the show will evoke a world in which the burning earth is letting go of its skin, and this skin is turning into “bodies that seem to belong in the air.” Some of them are climbing out of the soil; others are perched high on walls, as if they’re about to take to the skies. The sculptures are at once high-tech, with a sci-fi sheen, and organic, constructed of materials including rubber, walnut, wax, and blown glass. “I always want my works to look like you don’t quite know how they’ve been made,” Humeau says. “Like they are breathing or are about to move.”

The sculptures, part of an ongoing series that the artist has created with a large team of specialists ranging from scientists to mystics, are equal parts alluring and unnerving. Humeau, 37, even used three “geomancers”—people who divine magical properties at certain locations in the earth—as part of Orisons, a 160-acre project in Colorado that she says was the largest piece of land art ever undertaken by a female artist. The plot she worked on, in the San Luis Valley, had been so badly affected by drought that it was declared impossible to farm. Humeau populated it with 84 sculptures, placed at points which the geomancers had deemed significant—“like acupuncture”—in order to create a ritual imagining a reactivation of the land, and the kinds of lifeforms that might survive the climate apocalypse. “At first you think there’s nothing there,” Humeau says, “but with time you start to see all these creatures that live underground and pass by. It got me thinking that life forms had to become creative in this kind of context, and also be extremely resilient.”

The film she made in the San Luis Valley will be shown as part of “\*sk\*/ey-.” Humeau turned footage from the site into a fable of death, rebirth, migration, and some kind of afterlife. While its inescapable backdrop is the climate crisis, “My work is not about being an activist,” she says. “It’s about telling stories and imagining possible ways to exist on earth, and it’s also celebrating the power of imagination and of collaboration—I have a huge team of people around me making things happen.”

Humeau grew up in Beaupréau, in the Loire valley in France, “a really small village where 70 percent of the inhabitants are called Humeau.” Her family moved to a larger town, Nantes, when she was 13. She grew up going to museums and galleries and wanted to go to art school, but after failing to get accepted by any, she settled on a textiles course at the Ecole des Arts Appliqués in Paris. She then studied industrial design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, but dropped out after 18 months. Her breakthrough came when she was accepted into the now-defunct Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art in London, which she says was “dedicated to thinking about the role of emerging technologies in our lives and developing scenarios of how things could go wrong, or how they could affect us.”

The students in the course included artists, designers, poets, dancers, and illustrators; this multidisciplined approach fired Humeau’s imagination. Her diploma project was called The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures. She and the audio developer Julien Bloit attempted to reconstruct the larynxes of prehistoric animals using data and MRI scans of woolly mammals frozen in Siberia, in order to allow their voices to be heard again—in theory, anyway.

The following year, Tate Britain in London showed Humeau’s subsequent work, Echoes, in which she presented what was purported to be the voice of Cleopatra singing a love song in the nine extinct languages the Queen of the Nile was said to speak, in a gallery painted with a substance derived from the venom of the Black Mamba, the snake with which Cleopatra committed suicide. “I’m interested in what different states of being are,” Humeau says. “It’s the recurring constant quest in my work to understand what it means to be present. Can you have a voice and not a body? Does it mean you’re alive? What is the bare minimum to feel the presence of someone?”

Since graduating, Humeau has continued to work in London, even though, as she jokes, “I sound like I just arrived—my French accent has never changed.” She has a basic team of three people, though Humeau works with a lot of external artisans who help her fabricate her sculptures. “This show was challenging in a good way,” she says of “\*sk\*/ey-.” “The textile wall works are complex because we’ve developed all these new techniques of embellishing. We cast felt, which you can’t really do. I’m interested in beeswax because it’s the product of collective organisms. We do a lot of material research.” Part of the inspiration for “\*sk\*/ey-” came from sifting through pictures of birds’ nests, root systems, and images of mold under microscopes. All this is poured into sculptures that are rooted in nature as we know it, but feel nonetheless alien. “They are a little bit bigger than human size, which I think is a little unsettling for sure,” Humeau says.

Miami is certainly the ideal place to exhibit them, given that it is one of the frontiers of the climate emergency. This connection was not lost on the artist. While installing her pieces, Humeau stopped to watch “huge flocks of birds” flying over the ICA and migrating to the Everglades. She noted that with her creatures escaping the burning planet and planning their journey into orbit, “there was a direct reflection of what was happening in the show.”