Inner Textures II
Artist Statement
In Part II, I wanted you to touch these textures, feel how rugged, spiky, invitingly smooth they can be. I wanted you to physically experience this piece, and by tracing it, to hear what that feels like. You can make music out of pain, I hear.
The copper pieces would be connected to sensors, turning them into instruments. By tracing the surface, you would trigger sound. Low rumblings, leaves rustling, atmospheric textures that shift with the pressure and direction of your touch. The piece would respond to you. You would be playing it without quite knowing how.
Copper never looks the same twice. Every touch leaves a trace. Through the right treatment, the surface oxidizes in the places it is touched the most, meaning the piece would change depending on where people chose to put their hands. In the end, it wouldn't just be mine anymore. It would be a collective piece, a shared patina built from everyone who encountered it. The surface becomes a memory carrier, archiving each encounter across time. As Octavia Butler wrote, 'whatever you touch you change, and whatever you change, changes you'. To touch is to alter, to be altered.
Because I had a clear idea of what I wanted but had never worked with copper this way before, I collaborated with AI to research the processes and understand how this could actually work. The images here are AI-generated, created as visual explorations of what the pieces might look like.
Here are my insides. Play with them. See what happens.
This project remains conceptual for now. If you are a chemist or a sound designer, please get in touch so we can bring this to life.
AI-generated image
AI-generated image
Alexandra Margarint is a photographer and visual artist. She graduated from the Contemporary Media Practice program at the University of Westminster in 2014, working with photography and installation as forms of expression. After six years in software development, she has returned to her artistic practice. She spent 13 years in London, where her work was exhibited at Ambika P3 and The Holy Art Gallery. She is now based in Iasi, Romania.
@alexandra_marge
Artist Statement
INNER TEXTURES I is a two-part series of photographs taken during the pandemic. I was fortunate enough to live near Peckham Rye park in London, and walking there, taking pictures of plants, was a large part of keeping me relatively sane. I'd been dealing with depression and anxiety all my life, and a long period of isolation did not do any favors to my mind or my heart.
When I returned to these images later, I started noticing a pattern. In most of them, texture kept resurfacing - some scratchy, some soft and decaying, some almost stabbing. These textures mirrored how I was moving through the isolation and uncertainty. Sometimes it was restricting and painful. Sometimes soft, but only as a small respite from the pain - not met with hope, as I would have liked, but with a kind of resignation.
Through this work, I invite you to touch through seeing.
I don't want you to hurt.
I need a witness.