This exhibition brings together Marie and Flo’s practices through their shared interests in hauntings, domestic space and fictional histories. Working with installation, painting, comics and found objects from around Eastbourne, both artists play with humour, disorientation and historical slippages. Shown together at VOLT, Flo’s domestic interiors and Marie’s pastoral scenes will be stages for their objects and characters to form new worlds. 

Through paintings, ceramics and found objects, Marie introduces the character of the House Slug. She is a figure trespassing into scenes of Victorian pastoral idyll and idealised femininity often found on ceramic dinnerware. The House Slug embodies social and physical pressures placed on women in domestic, rural and working environments. We see her repeatedly in these idealised scenes: slumped, exhausted, crumpled; supine, dancing, ecstatic. She embodies a sense of release and euphoria that can emerge from a state of depression and when things no longer seem to hold their meaning.  

Flo works with objects collected from around Eastbourne combined with painting, photography and installation to construct fictional histories. Through ideas of haunting and personal mythology, objects are re-situated within domestic and ‘natural’ environments built in the gallery. Water is a recurring presence in these scenes, carrying its own narratives and merging with the lives of the collected materials. A cabinet holding different objects, trinkets and tchotchkes will be in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. Visitors are encouraged to rifle through these, to take away any that catch their attention and re-donate them to Devonshire Ward’s charity shops. 

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Marie Sahy is a visual artist from Vevey, Switzerland. After studying for a BA in Fine Art at édhéa in Sierre (CH), she then graduated in 2022 with an MA in Fine Art (with distinction) from the University of Brighton, where her final essay took the form of a graphic novel.

In her work, often punctuated with humour and cynicism, she explores themes such as power dynamics in the private sphere and how social constructs influence personal identity. She draws inspiration from her personal life, dusty museum trinkets, old Belgian bande dessinées and films.

She is interested in questioning the traditional hierarchy between high and low art, and in what is considered “fine art,” “graphic design,” “craft,” or “comics” - all disciplines she is drawn to. In her practice, she explores how the graphic novel can function as a visual language and how it might be extended into the gallery space. Her work takes the form of installations, framed pieces or zines.

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Flo Wright is an artist based in Eastbourne. Since graduating from Wimbledon College of Art in 2021, she has been an Associate Artist with Devonshire Collective and was part of the Flatlands x De La Warr Pavillion studio development programme. She also leads Devonshire Collective’s youth programme. 

Flo’s work explores the influence of people on their surroundings by examining the objects they choose to live with and the impact of time upon them. She often uses the home or domestic space as both a backdrop and a set in which to experiment with storytelling.

Flo collages historical and contemporary periods to emphasise the presence of the past. By layering different moments in time, she seeks both to disorient the viewer and to allow the past to become a character within her work. She is interested in merging fiction with truth as a way of understanding our personal environments.

Hauntology plays a significant role in Flo’s research and she often incorporates nostalgic or time-specific elements into her work, drawing on her own memories, fabricated narratives and popular culture.

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