Marie Hugo is a French artist who divides her time between London and the South of France. Born in the Camargue into a family of artists, she studied lithography and engraving at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier and spent much of her early life in her father Jean Hugo's studio. After her studies, she lived in Asia, where her travels in the Far East and Chinese art became important influences on her work. Since the late 1990s, water and Indian ink have been central to her practice, which moves between figuration and abstraction and encompasses painting, works on paper, sculpture, installation and photography. Her major projects include a monumental work for the Corrida Goyesque in Arles in 2015 and research at Hauteville House in Guernsey on the decorative work of her great-grandfather, Victor Hugo, which led to the publication of Hauteville House, Victor Hugo décorateur. In recent years, she has returned increasingly to colour, with trees and the natural world becoming recurring subjects in her work.

Palace of Theseus

For this small painting, I worked on Ingres card with Indian ink and water. The Palace of Theseus appears at night, close to the sea, while the ink running through the water creates the mystery of the setting. Above it hangs a full moon, soon to become Shakespeare’s “silver bow”.

I work mainly with Indian ink, water and pigments because I am drawn to the way ink takes on a life of its own when it meets water. It runs, spreads and settles in ways that can never be entirely controlled, and I work with what happens, allowing shapes and images to emerge from the movement of the materials.

In these small works, I have taken particular images from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and made them my own. A lantern and a bush of thorns become a dark wood; the moon hangs over the Palace of Theseus, still full but on its way to becoming Shakespeare’s “silver bow”; and Oberon’s description of the sea growing calm and stars shooting from their spheres becomes a violet sea beneath a sky scattered with ink.

I like the contrast between the precision of Shakespeare’s words and the unpredictability of ink and water. The images move between the recognisable and the abstract, while retaining something of the play's strange, dreamlike world.