Visionarily blending myths and science, Marguerite Humeau’s art feels as if it exists in another spatial and temporal dimension—one where time and geometry bend toward both an ancient remote past and the distant future. Her practice, as methodical as a laboratory experiment, has evolved over the years into a restless, almost alchemical exploration of materials, media and timelines. The result? Creatures that teeter between ominous and ethereal, endowed with a clairvoyant edge, as if they hold the secrets of what’s to come for this fragile planet. Grounded in a deep fascination with biological forms and natural phenomena, Humeau’s work slips effortlessly into abstraction and symbolism, granting her access to imaginary realms that feel extreme yet startlingly plausible. In these spaces, she conjures future worlds that are as poetic as they are unsettling.
Timed to coincide with Art Basel Miami, Humeau recently unveiled a major exhibition at ICA Miami—her first large-scale institutional presentation in the United States. Observer caught up with her to dig into how her art straddles the mythological and bio-fictional, probing the future evolutions of human existence while pulsing with an awareness of the perpetual cycles of transformation and mutation that govern the universe.
Taking over the museum’s third floor, Humeau conjures a deserted landscape—somewhere between post-human and pre-human—a harsh and cryptic territory populated by totemic figures that appear to have survived a mysterious Earthly mutation. The inspiration came from her time spent working in the deserts of Colorado. “It’s very dry there, and life there is very harsh as the territory goes through big droughts. There are dust storms, rocks. You feel very vulnerable, in that natural environment,” she recalls. Yet, as Humeau spent more time there, she began to notice the abundance of life that had learned to adapt. Most strikingly, she observed that survival often meant embracing movement—a nomadic existence of constant travel. “It got me thinking that, maybe, in the future, once the Earth will dry up, we’ll have to become creatures of the air.”
Hanging on the walls, suspended as though fluctuating in space, Humeau’s sculptural creatures evoke an eerie duality. They resemble austere, winged shamans—mysteriously silent and carrying a sense of ancient, untouchable wisdom—yet they could just as easily be monstrous alien beings that have crash-landed in a post-human world. Each has a distinct name, but they all come together in what Humeau calls a “Conference in the Air,” gathering to deliberate on their survival after being exiled from terrestrial existence and adapting to an ethereal, airborne state.
Humeau envisions the exhibition space as a kind of time portal, one that leaves viewers grappling with the mystery of these airborne nomads. From their lofty perches, the creatures seem to watch the audience, as if scanning for signs of recognition. These beings are something other—beyond human yet familiar—either substitutes for humanity, further evolutions that have merged with other species, or entirely new forms of life. “We don’t know if it’s happening in the near present or future. We don’t know if they are evolutions of humans or if there are new species.” It’s this fluidity—this sense of timelessness and placelessness—that permeates the show. Everything in the exhibition orbits around the idea of metamorphosis, a perpetual motion that is both a survival strategy and the last gasp before extinction.
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In creating this captivating, immersive narrative, Humeau once again demonstrates her extraordinary mythopoiesis—an art form she seems to carry in her bones. Her creatures draw from timeless archetypes, ancient truths and the echoes of once-living beings, all woven together to form a vision of what might lie ahead. After all, Humeau is, at her core, a world-builder, a seer who uses her art as a looking glass to the future.
These airborne sculptures share the space with massive sculptural forms firmly rooted to the ground—monolithic presences that resemble colossal mycelium systems erupting from the earth. Rising vertically toward the sky, they mirror the aspirations of their airborne counterparts for transcendence and ascendant movement. Yet their decaying surfaces—textured with mold-like patterns and flesh-like details—foretell a darker fate: slow degradation and extinction. Their surfaces ooze with slimy, viscous petals or scales, cloaked in what appears to be a poisonous secretion, perhaps a defense mechanism against external threats or an attempt to expel toxins already lodged within. The encrusted beeswax layered across them adds an uncanny, almost epidemic quality, like parched earth or peeling skin cracking under relentless drought and heat. It’s a hauntingly visceral image, one Humeau links to art historian Petra Lange-Berndt’s statement, “The soil is full of decomposed bodies.”
Each sculptural work in the show reflects Humeau’s relentlessly experimental approach to materiality, as she blurs the line between organic textures and man-made imitations of epidemical phenomena. Her practice probes the integration—and inevitable hybridization—of the anthropic and the natural, prompting a profound reconsideration of bodies, industrial relics, and the intricate webs of interdependence we share with the non-human world.
Humeau explains that her process began with felt. But in her studio, alongside her collaborators, she began layering unconventional materials—rust, dirt and wax—pushing their expressive possibilities to create the dense, evocative textures and patterns that animate the work. Each material choice was guided by her desire to capture a specific impression, to mimic a particular natural phenomenon with uncanny precision.
Atop the winged shaman figures, Humeau has added ovular glass shapes, elements she describes as a respiratory system. Using this translucent, almost alchemic material, she envisions a future where survival requires an entirely new form of exchange between living beings and an environment that has become too hostile even to allow for breathing.
To orchestrate this intricate fusion of symbiosis and alternative models of coexistence, Humeau collaborated with a strikingly diverse group of experts—anthropologists and paleontologists, yes, but also foragers and clairvoyants. Recognizing the limits of science, she doesn’t stop at research or data alone. Instead, she pushes the boundaries, blending scientific speculation with alternative wisdom, tapping into the forgotten echoes of long-lost life and remote truths. What emerges is a vision she aptly describes as “terrible, yet possible” bio-fiction—dystopian, yes, but also revelatory, a chilling glimpse of where our planet might be headed. “I am extracting the essences of real events, and then expanding into ‘what if?’ scenarios,” Humeau says. “I am prototyping worlds that are invisible, extinct, or parallel to ours.”
This distinctive storytelling—rooted in scientific data but propelled by something far more mythical—finds its fullest expression in Humeau’s new video work, *sk*/ey- (2024), which lends the exhibition its title. In the video, sweeping footage of her time in the desert combines with an epic narrative arc: barren landscapes and violent storms play alongside close-ups of the myriad life forms persisting in that unforgiving terrain. “I didn’t have a storyboard or anything, but I just felt that I had to document. I have to feel like because the artwork was the land,” she explains. The final product—primarily abstract and driven by the sublime—came later, as if dictated by moments of nature’s sublimity.
A saxophone-based music composition underscores the visuals, heightening the drama and adding an emotional layer to the experience. This is the first time Humeau has incorporated a formal musical component into her work, and the evocative score shifts seamlessly between fluid, sweeping movements and sharp, rhythmic breaks, evoking a sense of suspense and raw emotion.
Yet, human figures remain conspicuously absent in the video, their presence instead implied through the disruptive traces of anthropological impact. From the origins of life to a violent storm that erases all living beings, leaving behind the possibility of a new, non-human world, the narrative forces viewers to wrestle with profound ecological and existential questions. “There is a sort of storm where all animals decide to migrate, opening up the possibility to a new mode of existence,” Humeau says. The earthbound life-forms, unable to remain rooted in a sterile, barren world, transform into sky-bound nomads—restless inhabitants of another plane, seeking survival in a dimension yet unknown.
Humeau doesn’t deal in answers. Instead, she presents a dense weave of metaphors, inviting viewers to interpret the narrative in their own way. The result is a powerful work of speculative fiction—one that opens the mind to possible futures without dictating any singular outcome. As Humeau is quick to clarify, the exhibition does not aim to depict a bleak or definitively post-human scenario. Instead, she offers a hypothesis, a question mark: what types of hybrid forms of life might endure? “It’s an opportunity to see ourselves as part of a greater history of the universe. We don’t really matter in the broader picture of the history of the cosmos,” she explains. “I hope this is an invite to not think in terms of the individual or the species but rather embrace the interconnected dimension of our life. In the end, life survives. With my work, I’m exploring how and which species will survive and considering how species have survived in the past.”
In the end, Humeau’s vision remains vast and humbling. It’s not about predicting doom but about expanding our sense of scale to understand how we fit into a cosmic history that stretches far beyond us.
“Marguerite Humeau: \*sk\*/ey-” is on view at ICA Miami through March 30, 2025.
