Marcel Cousins - Resting Place

Artwork Description:

This series examines experiences in and around domestic spaces, highlighting the significance of everyday moments. Through an exploration of daily interactions, familiar environments, and fleeting instances of quiet reflection, the work seeks to capture the beauty, nostalgia, and emotional depth found in the mundane. By considering the relationships between people, objects, and their surroundings, it encourages viewers to reevaluate the small, often unnoticed moments that shape our sense of home, belonging, and identity.

Artist Statement:

My work explores how technological developments have reshaped the ways we codify the world through signs, symbols, and the environments we inhabit. It considers how these systems influence our perception of reality and our role within it, with a focus on media, language, semiotics, appropriation, and their impact on identity, social structures, power, landscape, and truth.

We now live in a world where “the real” is inseparable from the image-driven sphere of digital life. How has our fragmentary, media-saturated environment altered how we see and understand the world? What are the consequences of a reality increasingly defined by simulation, where physical experience gives way to constructed perception?
This constant cross-pollination between real and virtual challenges our sense of self. Identity is formed through a negotiation with the world, yet in hyperreality, we’re left with fragments—connected yet disjointed—producing a sense of loss beneath the surface.

My work seeks to make the ordinary feel unfamiliar, unsettling, or disorienting by analysing commonplace objects and images within their familiar contexts. By enlarging, distorting, or dissecting these elements, I emphasise their often-overlooked significance. More importantly, this method enables the placement of familiar objects and images into new contexts, thereby critiquing their aesthetic and cultural implications.