Marcia Teusink’s practice focuses on the complex and tangled history of people, plants, and other natural materials, exploring how historic attitudes and interventions in nature have impacted ecosystems today. Her work emerges from a love for the natural world and natural history collections, as well as a serious concern for the state of the planet. Wondering how society arrived at current levels of natural devastation and global warming has led her to concentrate on extractionist natural histories and to question what aspects of Enlightenment thinking and its legacies might have contributed to a path so detrimental to the natural world. She grapples with the tension of loving museums and appreciating humanity’s obsession with collecting and categorizing, while also critiquing and subverting these rationalist approaches to nature. Teusink raises these questions through painting, video, mixed media sculpture, and installations.
Teusink is a post-colonial transplant, having grown up in the USA and lived in the UK and Europe for over 20 years. She has recently been awarded a Women in Print, funded residency at ArtLab Contemporary Print Studios (U. of Lancashire), AA2A residency at Cambridge School of Art (Anglia Ruskin University) and a DYCP grant from Arts Council England. In 2025 she co-curated Messages from a Silent River at Hypha Studios and presented Pangaea Dreaming, a collaborative film and installation, with Marie-Thérèse Ross at Sluice Seyðisfjörður Expo & Film Festival (Iceland). Recent solo exhibitions include Rome Botanical Gardens (Italy) and a commissioned installation at Od Arts Festival (Somerset). The artist holds an BA in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, an MFA from the City University of New York at Queens College, and an MA in Museum Education from the Institute of Education, UCL. Her studio is in The Chocolate Factory in Stoke Newington.
www.marciateusink.com
@marcia_teusink
