Performative Strokes

Written by Duncan Ballantyne-Way

Through the performative act of swimming, Marie Jeschke uses the movements of her own body to create charged, deeply enigmatic artworks that press for a more penetrative and multisensory engagement with nature and its bodies of water. All the paintings in the series ‘1. Mai’ (May 1st) are conceived and performed by the artist beneath the surface of local waters surrounding Berlin, with the artist transposing her swimming strokes directly onto the canvas. In their intense duality between personal expression and abstract illusion, the finished paintings open up an ambiguous, multifarious space where nature and human imagination converge. Allowing the artist to subtly undermine the anthropocentric separation between human and the non human world, creating a porous space where nature, femininity and creation intersect.

Jeschke, who for years, has explored connections and mindfulness through a collaborative artistic practice, allows the water – the lifeblood that courses through our bodies and pulses through life on every level – and its opacity to steer and influence the creation of the paintings. So that rather than serving as a backdrop or subject matter, nature becomes an active participant and co-creator; facilitating a process of painting with nature and not simply from it. It is a scenario that begins with her casting mineral pigments scooped up from the banks of the water systems, which are then applied onto the surface of the damp canvas, building up layer upon layer of colour to achieve the ideal responsiveness to her hands and body. 

Upending the divisions between the marine and terrestrial world, Jeschke uses her underwater movements as a means to unravel and defamiliarise our relationship to water, turning performative swimming propulsions into inscrutable aesthetic and emotional expressions. Taken out of their (aquatic) context, the gestures teem with allusions and indecipherable imagery. In the work, Monsters Below, the overlapping gestural marks put you in mind of a skeletal ribcage or the flailing legs of an upturned insect. Her enacted movements forming a new gestural vocabulary that speaks intuitively of human interdependence with non-human elements and forces.

Far from being documentations of her movements, the paintings, with their crepuscular shades of dark green, blue and yellow, resonate with the intimacy of her underwater encounters. And in the artist’s application of predominantly breast stroke, human’s oldest swimming technique (a culturally-learnt movement, passed down from generation to generation), the work exists in the paradox of being both cultural and visceral, conceptual and raw. As projections of her own immersive encounters, she conveys to the viewer her own personal, subjective experiences of being in the water. The physiological impulses, the sense of heightened alertness, inextricably pulling us into the more-than-human world and its ecosystems. An idea further emphasised by the expansive (occasionally even turbulent) gestural marks displayed on the canvases, contrasted with the contemplative processes of their creation; when – submerged beneath the water – the artist experiences the mirrored serenity of light reflecting off the surface above. 

At a moment when the need for social change and environmentalism compels many artists to pursue protest and organizing, Jeschke’s position is one of amplified engagement. Reconfiguring our contact with nature by extending vital and lucid methodologies for connection. As she says herself: “Attributing meanings and contexts to things is an invisible act of being human”, alluding not only to the possibility of more fluid interactions between humans and non-human elements, but, just as importantly, the urgent desire to uncover those connections also. Immersed beneath the bracingly cold waters around her home, her own intensely personal forms of experiencing, knowing and becoming are essential to that reengagement.