Marie-Thérèse lives and works in London and is a member of The Royal Society of Sculptors. She is an Art Gemini Prize winner (2021). Her work has been exhibited internationally including New York (USA), and Germany, and in exhibition spaces across the UK.

This sculpture is made of reclaimed wood, off-cuts, and weathered pieces which are carved and joined together to create an anthropomorphic birdlike creature. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s jettisoned volume of later salvaged plays and sketches, ‘Ends and Odds’, this sculpture’s title is borrowed from the play ‘Not I’ The play is performed in darkness save for a spotlight on “Mouth”. This mouth delivers an intense and rapid monologue and declares ‘Out…Into This World.’ Early on in the play. Drawing on Beckett’s sense of the absurd and tragicomedy, this piece responds with a playful and spontaneous approach to the process of making. This lends the work a darkly subversive quality, confronting themes including mortality and the human condition.

Artist Statement

Marie-Thérèse Ross’ work explores her inner unconscious world, focusing on conflicting states of the physical body as well as emotional and psychological transformations. The human figure is central to her practice as she explores the human condition. She seeks to both reveal and hide awkward personal experiences, episodes that reflect on her own sense of vulnerability and mortality.

Marie-Thérèse carves upcycled wood and incorporates discarded ‘found’ objects which are then integrated and sublimated into the works. She is drawn to wood as a material because of its place in the history of art within the canon of painting, printmaking and sculpture. Its physicality and suitability for collage and colour allows her the flexibility of building three-dimensional works imbued with a powerful visceral and emotive quality. She constructs works that extend into physical space and yet exist between painting and sculpture. Her playful and spontaneous approach to the process of making gives her work a humorous and darkly subversive quality, confronting themes which include grief, and mortality.