Her water lily paintings came to life in an old railway warehouse where steam trains are being renovated. Trains roar past her studio and outside is an industrial graveyard of rusted boilers and scrap metal.
Like their setting, the paintings are robust - their highly textural surfaces worked over and over until they look like ancient weathered walls or corroded metal. Through her highly individual use of household paint, bitumen, and gold and silver leaf, Marika makes paintings that evoke stillness and contemplation in the viewer. You want to go up and touch them. As well as this robustness, the paintings have a sense of fragility, offering up indistinct images of iconic symbols, the bowl and the water lily, and nudging us toward the abstract and metaphysical world.
The paintings allude to both Eastern and Western mysticism. The use of gold and silver leaf in art dates back to ancient European frescos and the water lily, or lotus as it is known in the East, symbolizes a spiritual unfolding. The plant starts with its roots in the slime and grows upwards through the opaque waters, flowering in the sun and the light of heaven. It embodies the feminine and symbolizes both fire and water.
Reading her paintings as aids to meditation and transformation makes further sense when you consider the chemical reactions that are part of the making process. Like alchemy, the medieval forerunner of chemistry in which base metals were transmuted into gold or silver, a chemical transformation has quite literally occurred in Marika’s paintings.
The lotus flowers are deliberately abstract and elusive, though they stem from Marika’s observations of water lilies in her pond at home. She equates the heavily textured surface of the canvas and the dotted outlines of the flowers with the surface of her own skin. “I get goose bumps when I sense something that can’t be seen,” she says. For her, painting is a daily practice or meditation - a reaffirmation of faith in a benevolent organizing principle greater than we are. “It is a way of connecting,” she says.
Both image and surface emphasize the iconic nature of Marika’s paintings. By using gold and silver leaf, she references early religious painting. Through the repetition of the water lily image she emphasizes our reading of these works as objects of contemplation and a reflection on the spiritual.
Marika first began painting seven years ago after making a rapid and fateful decision to leave the corporate world and become an artist – a decision which bore fruit almost immediately when, as a first year Elam student, her first exhibition was a sell out show. Even now, with many successes behind her, her painting practice is a constant test of her faith and belief in herself as a painter. It is this struggle to evolve a subtle yet powerful language to talk about the intangible that gives these works their power, the sense that the artist doesn’t quite know where she is going but is compelled to continue exploring nevertheless.