Marie-Jeanne Musiol is an image artist who also produces experimental videos and books. She initially photographed archeological sites in the Mayan jungle and on the Tibetan plateau where traces of ancient lives emerge and activate memory. In the course of numerous subsequent walks through the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, she experienced the limits of photographic representation. The intense energy perceived in the vast fields of ruins directed her to seek a more expressive process to translate the felt presence in that space.

 

She now explores phenomena of an energetic nature and assembles a vast herbarium with the luminous imprints of plants  recorded in an electromagnetic field. Their bodies of light are expressed in hundreds of images with circumstances varying from sheer radiance to progressive dessication or restoration with hands and thought. These experiments reveal seamless fluidity between light and matter, a movement more indicative of quantum fluctuations than solid visible states. 

 

She also extracts mirror images of the cosmos enfolded in the radiant coronas  that are suggestive of a holographic universe. Her videos capture the vital expression of leaves pulsating in light fields. An artist book The Radiant Forest: An Energy Herbarium published by pfoac in Montreal describes in depth this creative arc where intuition and experimentation intersect.

 

Marie-Jeanne Musiol's work is anchored in the long history of the fusion of photography and electricity. Her images of plants could constitute a first energy botany, in the continuity of the cyanotypes of algae and ferns produced by the pioneering Anna Atkins (1799-1871). The artist's electrodynamic photograms, in which matter and light cohabit at the porous borders of plants, are exhibited as light boxes, installations and videos in galleries and museums in Canada and abroad.