Marley Foster
About
Marley Foster (she/her) is a sculptor and educator from Houston, Texas. She earned BAs in Studio Art and English from Rice University, and recently earned her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Houston. Her work has most recently been featured in Annex Energy at SITE Gallery Houston and the University of Houston’s Mitchell Center For The Arts Convergence Research platform. Foster currently works as an Adjunct Instructor at the University of Houston and Teaching Artist with various Houston art institutions.
Foster creates work around themes and questions of home, femininity, whiteness, and social change, through the lens of domestic objects and their material histories. As a cultural investigation, she takes apart and reconfigures the objects that fill domestic spaces - altering familiar items like pillows, curtains, and ceiling fans just enough to expose them as artifacts of white, middle-class suburban costumes, rituals, and social stratification. Alternating between labor intensive sewing practices and quick digital photography, Foster’s recent work explores the layers of “American” history held within the stuff that fills our homes, and attempts to unravel the family dynamics, Southern conservatism, and gender norms within which she was raised.
As these hallmarks of suburban homes are Frankensteined together, Foster is interested in the subversive potential of relocating such traditional American domestic fashions through photography, collapsing the digital space of social media with the very real spaces we occupy. In creating objects and images, she’s invested in the history of her materials - where do they come from? What do they tell us about the people and places with whom they are associated? What can we learn from the material histories held in seemingly banal objects like curtains, quilts, and kitchen chairs? What (queer, intersectional, feminist, liberated, pleasurable) imaginations of space and self-presentation are made possible when these histories are acknowledged and carried forward in new, subversive ways?