Artist - Livia Marin

Chilean artist Livia Marin is an artist that works mostly with manufactured materials. She takes something that passes under our nose everyday and looks at it with a critical eye. In an interview with It's Nice That she says, "What fascinates me about everyday objects are the traces of humanity that are lodged in them and which it is possible to bring to the fore in art. These traces embrace both their processes of making or construction and the daily use-relationship we establish with them."

Marin pursued an art career in Chile and has exhibited widely both in Chile and abroad (Argentina, Brazil, Sweden, USA). She has lived and worked in London for five years and is currently completing a practiced led PhD programme at Goldsmiths College.

In particular, I came across a show called "Broken Things" which was open from October - November 2009 at the House of Propellors gallery. She has taken everyday, manufactured pieces that appear exactly the same and injected into them the issues of brokenness and recuperation. What is cool about her idea of brokenness is that we generally think once something material is broken it goes out of use and can be discarded. But the idea of recuperation comes into play if and when the owner has a strong attachment to it.

She says, "It’s that moment of decision or indecision of value for that object that interests me and that I try to recreate by building the object as an ambiguous figure. Within this, it is important that I have worked with mass-produced, non-noble objects, whereby things that were not important in the first place achieve a value or significance by the attachments that people form with them."