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Christopher Marley Biography | Portfolio
My phobia became stifling when I began to travel at 19 years old. After two tumultuous years in South America, I spent several years in and out of Southeast Asia and Africa with little improvement. Then one fateful night in a Bangkok artisan market I stumbled upon a group of handicapped people selling what appeared to be small marsupials crammed into cheap frames. Upon closer examination I realized they were bugs! I was overcome with horror, nausea, and -- what's this? A surging fascination. As a young artist, my subject matter of choice had always been the fantastical and macabre but I had never had the opportunity to examine insects in a less than life threatening environment. Now, I was enthralled by the size, colors, ridiculous shapes, and perfect mechanics of creatures that I was seeing close up and harmless for the first time. Years later, while working in Cape Town, I mustered up the courage to dismantle the frames I had been collecting, scrape out the insects held captive in such thoughtless presentation, and make something interesting for myself. The experience of actually handling the specimens and using them as a medium of design opened a Pandora's box for me. Years of study in Entomology followed, then excursions to ridiculously remote locales to collect and observe selected species in their own habitats. One goofy idea followed another until I opened my own gallery in Hermosa Beach, CA, in 2000. As my fascination with insects was inspired by a desperation to avoid them, the presentation is antiseptic. Minimalist to escape the claustrophobia that almost universally accompanies one's interactions with arthropods. Perfectly symmetrical so that the insects themselves, and the designs they comprise evoke feelings of structure, mechanics and Form rather than slithering and clicking. An industrial designer’s fantasy rather than an entomological quagmire. Pheromones are chemical stimulants that insects release to attract one another -- and they’ve been known to seduce the occasional human, too. ---Christopher Marley |
