Through fabric, humor, and uncanny tenderness, Marine One creates interactive installations that turn viewers into participants, and sometimes, the ones being observed. We spoke about contradiction, culture, softness, and the strange power of making people laugh, then question why they did.
In her Untitled (…) series, Marine stitches together soft fabric and hard truths, plush humor and sharp critique. Inflated heads, sequined businessmen, moldy feasts: her works appear playful at first but quickly shift into something more complex, or quietly unsettling.
Marine works with fabric, stuffing, and sewn forms to explore gender, discomfort, and cultural bias. The softness is always intentional. “I like the contradiction,” she says, “seeing something where you wouldn’t normally see it. Or a male face in a really soft, squishy material.”
Her interest in masculinity began as “an extension from my research into feminist art.” While studying at Central Saint Martins, she had focused on childhood and how unconscious bias forms early. “I started by looking at how the things you absorb shape who you are, then moved into feminism. But eventually I got curious about masculinity itself. Gender felt like the biggest unconscious influence everywhere, no matter the culture or generation.”
One of the pivotal works in the series, Untitled (Marcus), is a life-sized doll whose head inflates when the viewer presses a pedal. “At the time I was researching the relationship between audience and artwork,” Marine says. “I thought it would be interesting to let the audience initiate the life of the piece.” The result: a face that swells, then stares back. “It reverses the gaze. Suddenly, the artwork is watching you.”
The face was sourced from This Person Doesn’t Exist. “I was hunting for the creepiest one I could find,” she laughs. Yet viewers kept saying they recognized him: anonymous, but familiar.
That tension scales up in Untitled (Harry), installed in a disused supermarket refrigerator. “The ceiling was so low, and the light so harsh, it felt oppressive, like an office,” she recalls. “I filled the space with a huge male figure so it felt claustrophobic, like being stuck in an elevator with your boss. That awkward silence, that’s the kind of tension I love.” Viewers read him as strained, triumphant, flirty, or threatened. “Everyone saw something different. That’s when I know a piece is working.”
Audience participation runs through Marine’s practice. In Untitled (Conner), visitors sit at a dinner table of squishy, inedible food sculptures, pressing hidden buttons inside bread or chicken telephone to trigger sounds. “A strange figure sits at the head of the table, watching with 50 eyes, inviting you to break moldy bread with him.”
“I make things I want to see in art,” she says. “Interactive installation is one of my favourite media. I enjoy seeing people’s reactions, whether they laugh, or get scared, or disgusted. The reaction gets more obvious when they interact with it.”
Interaction brings practical challenges too. “Sometimes people need clear instructions,” she says. “Usually the rule in your mind is you can’t touch the works. So if you don’t clarify, you miss the audience who could participate.” Labels are fine, she adds, as long as they’re not too obstructive.
For Marine, humor isn’t a distraction from seriousness but a way in. “I like using humor as a cushion,” she says. “If I used realistic materials, the works would be too shocking. The softness lets people approach before realizing what it actually is.” She calls it “a kind of playful unease.”
Her works stretch beyond gender to power, performance, and observation itself , whether in plush recreations of Japanese cabinet portraits or surreal after-party scenes scattered with balloons and broken lamps.
“We’re always being watched, by others and ourselves,” she reflects. “It’s not only the world’s gaze. We’re constantly observing how we appear. My work just makes that visible.”
Research continues to shift her perspective too. “How deeply gender norms sit in us, even in me,” she says. “Every time I research, I find new things I didn’t notice before.”
She’s now interested in pushing the material language further: “I want to try new textile techniques, maybe machine embroidery. I’m curious how far I can push softness, how uncomfortable I can make people feel while they’re still smiling.”
Marine smiles, half-mischievous, half-sincere. “I just want to make people laugh,” she says,
“and then make them wonder why they laughed.”
Words Hanya Elghamry
MORE: @marine_one_art
