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Margot de Messieres

Animation / Video / Film, Drawing, Multimedia, Painting, Photography, Public Art, Sculpture / Installation, Visual / Media

I work across painting and time-based media to explore edges where landscape, weather, and human systems intersect, using color and layered materials to examine change, nostalgia, and doubt.

About the Artist

Marguerite de Messières is a Maryland-based multimedia artist working across painting, portraiture, sculpture, installation, and time-based media. Her work explores landscape, memory, and the relationship between individual and collective experience. She frequently creates community-responsive public art in collaboration with sculptor Tsvetomir Naydenov, combining painting, metalwork, and kinetic elements. Her work has been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, with recent honors including a Maryland State Creativity Grant and Sondheim Art Prize semifinalist recognition. She studied at Wesleyan University, SACI in Italy, and the National Academy of Art in Sofia.

Margot de Messieres website Margot de Messieres art Margot de Messieres website Public Art with Tsvetomir Naydenov

Artist's Statement

Working with painting, projection, and mixed materials, I focus on relationships between elements, how built and natural, personal and communal interact at thresholds and the in-between, particularly in moments of instability. Construction sites, weather events, rural and suburban boundaries appear as both physical places and time-based experiences. My work explores the traces we leave in the landscape and on each other, often blending natural and human elements to examine transformation, nostalgia, and doubt.  My public art practice informs this work through attention to audience, site, and shared space to value tactile, hand-worked materials and a humane, physical quality.

Featured Work

Photos

I’m developing a painting series that explores the tension between nostalgia, curiosity, fear, and beauty in rural landscapes under suburban development. Working on large, unstretched drop cloths, I focus on the charged moment of transformation: the arrival of machinery, the raw sweeps of dirt, the visual disorder as a field or road is remade. These scenes stir a deep ambivalence in me. I welcome new neighbors, and I’m struck by the dramatic beauty of shifting earth and human industry. Yet at the same time, I grieve the vanishing fields and the slow erosion of open land.
I’m developing a painting series that explores the tension between nostalgia, curiosity, fear, and beauty in rural landscapes under suburban development. Working on large, unstretched drop cloths, I focus on the charged moment of transformation: the arrival of machinery, the raw sweeps of dirt, the visual disorder as a field or road is remade. These scenes stir a deep ambivalence in me. I welcome new neighbors, and I’m struck by the dramatic beauty of shifting earth and human industry. Yet at the same time, I grieve the vanishing fields and the slow erosion of open land.
Looking at human traces and tracks in the rural winter landscape.
Looking at human tracks and traces in the rural winter landscape
I take commissions for portraits
portrait commissions taken in pencil, watercolor, oil, and encaustic

Videos

  • Cadence (Wildfire Suns)

    See more information about Cadence (Wildfire Suns)
    I made this work in response the Canadian wildfires of summer 2023, when smoke turned our skies hazy red for weeks. I washed soot out of my air filters, froze the dirty water into discs of ice, and filmed them melting on the floor of my studio. I paired this with footage of a cornfield near my home that is now being developed. I have passed it since childhood. The work holds what felt familiar and fragile at the same time, touched gently by cataclysms far away.
    The video is projected onto the paper relics of the process of melting the ice discs, with the watermarks and soot circles on them.
    Medium: video, paper, soot
    Year: 2024
    Details: dimensions variable, 36 seconds

  • Theophilus Thompson: An Elusive Kinetic Portrait

    See more information about Theophilus Thompson: An Elusive Kinetic Portrait
    With over 1000 hand-formed aluminum tiles which spin and flicker, the pixelated portrait of Theophilus Thompson, an early African American chess expert, mathematician and teacher from Frederick, Maryland, shifts and changes in the wind, honoring him while acknowledging his obscure history. Created with Tsvetomir Naydenov. More of our public art projects are at www.margotwitht.com
    Medium: mild steel, stainless steel, aluminum, glass, copper, enamel
    Year: 2020
    Details: 10’ x 14’ x 8’