Ava Markle's work explores the continuity of form across scale in the natural world, informed by her observations at home in the forests of upstate New York and her travels to more distant caves and mountains. In northern Maine, she explored the branching tributaries of Nesowadnehunk Stream and found the same fractal configuration as the mycelium that connects the mushrooms that lace their banks. This pattern appears in a moose's horns and a slime mold in the crotch of an inosculated maple.
Bifurcation is a seemingly ubiquitous feature across these landscapes and a repeated motif in Markle's work. It is the principle that allows water to find the most efficient path to the lowest point, and that achieves the dense complexity of the neural networks in our brain. A vertex in these networks is the record of a split, where two missionaries of the same body doubled their chances to find energy, send signals, and represent the whole. The beauty of Natural structures is an index of the history of their formation.
Moved by an understanding of form as a continuous process of becoming, Markle is drawn towards subject matter that exemplifies transience. Her process mirrors this understanding of form. Imagined structures appear unplanned, each mark intuitively informed by the last. This series of contingent choices results in images that feel both coincidental and inevitable.
"I want there to be a feeling of ambiguity", the artist says about her work. "It’s the side of a cliff and an intestine at the same time. It also doesn’t seem enough to say that I paint nature because there is always something distorted and alien about the forms even when I intend them to reference life." In the eyes of Ava Markle, nature is an unbridled entity that chases after its own expansion, whose representation is halted only by the confines of the painterly support. Looking at her works, the act of staring comes to mind, not as a result of mindless presence, but as an irrepressible impulse to catch a glimpse of the primordial forces hiding behind the veil of reality.
Ava Markle (b. 1998, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA at The Cooper Union in New York in 2021.
