Play With Nature
Marie Parker
“Art is where I play. Art is where adults play.”
Marie Parker actually plays in two worlds that sometimes overlap: Art and Nature. It was Nature that first alerted Parker to beauty, and it’s Art that she uses to record and amplify that beauty. For more than 30 years, Parker has photographed nature, mostly with the same camera, a Canon FTB. By using a 1 to 1 ring adapter over the lens, she has managed to get extremely close to minute subjects without distorting them.
A rich sample of this style, Moss Rose, Transiting Nebula, centers on a pink flower with petals fluttering in every direction like superhero cloaks. A yellow haze in the background looks like a solar cloud (hence the space travel reference in the title).
Parker has sensed a presence in nature since her childhood on a Louisiana farm and feels it is her duty to transcribe that presence through photography. She sees herself as Nature’s secretary, taking memos and dictations from the flora and fauna around her, lest their splendor be forgotten.
“All my photographs are taken in nature,” she says. “I just have a very strong sensual connection with nature. It’s always amazed me, even as a child. There is so much to see that you can pass by, but if you look, it’s a whole other world. If you get that close in nature, there’s going to be some really interesting backgrounds.”
By isolating minute plants and creatures, Parker dissociates them from their surroundings. In Moss Rose, Transiting Nebula, for example, she detaches the flower from its stalk and reduces the surroundings to a dust light. Rather than capturing the reality of her subjects, Parker evinces an aura from them. As a result, the photos resemble paintings more than documents.
In making her art, Parker bypasses the analytical self. She says she never thinks of a shot or subject in advance. She cannot sit down and plan what she creates. “It’s like the lens is a tunnel between me and another world,” she observes. “When my eye or some kind of inner eye sees something, then I click.”
The same principle applies to her assemblages, small sculpted works of found objects resting on small boards like straightened shoehorns. For years, Parker has collected buttons, pieces of metal, costume jewelry, and fabrics. Initially, she would assemble them into pins or boleros, intended for practical use, but then she began to develop them into “totems” that were less practical and more intriguing. Lines of metal, wire, and ball notes on one give the impression of music. On another, a button like a Vietnamese hat and a bead like a harlequin’s masque appear to showcase heads.
Parker claims the objects approach her and accommodate themselves in her art. “When I gather things, I don’t have in mind what I’m going to do,” she says. “I just think they’re beautiful in themselves; it’s sort of like they dictate the form themselves.”
For Parker’s latest piece, Untitled, she covered a box in raw off-white silk, fitted a lid onto it, placed a curved pipe like a periscope or a stove pipe on the lid and balanced it on four sticks of sea-smoothed wood. The contraption is somewhat reminiscent of the ice-planet walker from the Star Wars series, although Parker’s creation looks more organic than Lucas’ giant robot. Four legs make it more feasible than two. The natural contours of the wooden legs and the eyelike patches on each side of the box give the piece a sense of life.
“It looked like it was walking off, looked like it was traveling,” Parker says. “Then I realized it was from a dream. I had this dream about these little houses west of Austin, on these undulating hills and it was like a Disney movie. They all got up and started walking.”
For Bob (1990) is Parker’s shrine to a friend who died from AIDS. The upright fruit crate is fitted out like a Catholic grotto. On the back wall, a veil falls around a statuette of the Virgin Mary behind a glass-covered photo of Bob on the occasion of his First Communion. The box is lovingly wallpapered with bright flowered cloth and broken glass protects the roof. Across the opening, Parker has nailed three pieces of wood, grief barriers that look jagged and final. But on each side of the piece, cut into the rough wall, a window is covered by a laser copy of a Parker photo that draws the light through radiant colors for the same effect as a stained glass window. A departure for Parker, this piece marks the first interplay of her two artistic worlds.
An artistic conscience led Parker from Houston to Austin. When she visited the creeks and hills here in 1969, it felt like home. Getting to know the people confirmed the hunch. “I’m comfortable here,” she notes. “I guess in other places what I do might be peculiar, but here I don’t feel peculiar at all. I know that there are people around who have the same passions.”
Even so, when Parker attended her first art openings in town, she felt intimidated by all the posturing and cravats. To her relief, the appearance of alternative spaces and the changes in Austin demography have broken the dominance of the male upper crust in galleries. She no longer fears the art world and she no longer relies on it for a sense of well-being.
“There were a number of years when I was concerned with whether or not I was an artist and if I was an artist, was I any good,” she says. “But at some point I just let go, and I no longer care. I don’t care if my work is described as a craft and not art. Nor do I need to have that recognition any more. At some point, I just decided that I don’t need it any more. I’ll just do [my art] anyway.”
As far as Marie Parker is concerned, there is no point struggling. She cannot stop her creations. Like the bird that sings every morning, they continue regardless of recognition or praise. 
This article appears in May 25 • 2001.