Assessment UNIT 3
- martinamargaux
- May 27
- 18 min read
Lo1: Present evidence of a body of work that demonstrates a systematic enhancement of your knowledge and understanding.
(AC Realisation) When I joined this Master’s course two years ago, I was desperately seeking something, or so I believed: to learn new technical skills, to find my voice (more than new means of expression), to become an artist and to earn my place in the art community.
What surprises me and makes me deeply proud today is the radical evolution that has taken place since then.
What I found along the way is so much more than what I believed I was seeking, my transformation is much deeper than I had imagined: a community to which I will always belong, a voice I’ve always had but have finally learnt to listen to, an informed and critical approach to research, a grounded and independent practice, and a new understanding of what it truly means to be an artist.
The body of work I’ve developed across the MA reflects this systematic enhancement and growing clarity not only about what I do, but why I do it. And still, I know it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
My practice today sits at the intersection of memory, spirituality, psychology, and ritual. It is rooted in constant experimentation and driven by the pursuit of transformation: witnessing it, provoking it, and being transformed in return. The work that results from this process inhabits liminal spaces, between presence and absence, the visible and invisible, the material and the spiritual...
Looking back at my very first blog post, it’s quite emotional to see how far I’ve travelled.
That instinctive observation, written on a train directed god knows where, almost reads like a mindful meditation and carries the essence of a premonition. I see now how the shifting landscapes outside the window mirrored a state of transformation within. That unaware gaze, outward and inward at once, grew and sharpened to develop into a personal visual language and artistic philosophy.
In hindsight, I couldn’t have chosen a more fitting context to start this wild journey. A journey of discovery and failure, of reflection and growth...above all, a journey of awareness.
Unit 1 was a balance between playful exploration and the dismantling of long-held beliefs.
I was invited to take risks, to embrace uncertainty, to make with my hands, judgment-free. The creative freedom I found in this phase encouraged me to distance myself from familiar media like film and installation, and instead further explore digital photography and challenge myself with completely unfamiliar activities like painting.
It was in the spirit of this spontaneity and curiosity that, in November 2023, I entered a darkroom for the first time… and never left. Suddenly, everything shifted.
Analog photography was a revelation. One that pushed me to radically rethink what image-making is. The physicality of the materials, the alchemical quality of the process, the relation to time… the wonder of seeing an image emerge from darkness felt like witnessing birth. It quickly became a (healthy) obsession.
I took part in technical workshops in Paris (B&W and Colour printing), studied traditional techniques through books by Ansel Adams and Sarah Kennel, and joined a shared Darkroom lab in my hometown. This first period of experimentation laid the technical foundation of my practice.
By the end of Unit 1, I was shooting mostly on film, documenting my surroundings, my travels, people, plants. I developed a particular fascination with the desert and explored the theme of anthropomorphism in Shadows of Myth, which I exhibited at the Interim Show in March 2024.
This phase declared my shift toward seeing with new eyes.
But this way of seeing gradually began to feel too literal, too limited, too distant. I had an almost physical need to connect with the material, to seek beyond the surface, to peek beneath the curtain of rationality.
In Unit 2, my interest in alternative processes grew exponentially.
I joined Alternative Process Academy, an online platform that offers classes on various techniques and access to an international community of experimenters on Discord. I also created a specific category on the blog to document my progress.
Inspired by the work of Man Ray, I started making photograms in the shared darkroom lab. I was drawn to the purity of the photogram: photography reduced to its essence: drawing with light.
I also became increasingly hungry for alternative approaches to thinking about photography as an art medium.
Some of the most meaningful readings that informed my practice over these two years came from Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jean Charles Lemagny, Walter Benjamin, among others. I found inspiration in the brilliant works of experimental contemporary artists, such as Huang Zhang, Anzelm Kiefer, Anicka Yi, Alberto Burri, Yves Klein, Thomas Paquet and many more.
During Unit 2, I started studying the theories of Carl Jung, particularly his writings on ritual, art, and the collective unconscious, which turned out to be fertile ground for my ideas to take root in the following months.
These influences grounded my instinctive intuition into deeper reflections and more structured actions.
As my knowledge and mastery of alternative processes deepened and my experimental work evolved, the necessity of a personal working space became inevitable. I decided to transform part of my tiny Parisian apartment into a darkroom.
The support of my peer Daniel, a true expert when it comes to printing processes, was invaluable. Despite being mostly self-taught, I felt supported and motivated even when things got difficult.
This turn in my practice allowed me to really push my experimentation further, merging various materials and techniques while also beginning to develop my own artistic rituals. The darkroom became my sanctuary.
During one of my travels in the Middle East, I encountered a material that would dominate and guide my research and practice for the rest of the course: incense.
I integrated the crystal shapes I made with a balsamic type of incense into my photograms, gradually mastering the art of incense moulding and creating increasingly complex compositions. The result of these experiments is the series Kozmic Prayers, which I exhibited for Grotto in December 2024.
This work marked a significant moment in the systematic enhancement of my artistic language. I started to reflect not just on the aesthetics of my practice but on its intrinsic value.
I began to relate to incense not only as a material, but as a living presence, a carrier of collective memory and symbolic content. Symbolic, sensory, sacred.
In return, this newly found awareness led to a focused research that directly and naturally fed the next phase of my practice.
My fascination with incense grew into proximity, then into intimacy then into a profound understanding. I felt a visceral need to get so close to it that I would burn myself. And that’s literally what I did.
Following my intuition, I introduced combustion into my practice, burning incense directly onto silver gelatin paper.
Fire turned incense into something more than a material. It became an offering, a medium, a portal to other dimensions of the work, of myself, of existence.
The experiments with incense combustion gave birth to Hierophanies, a series of pyrograms that demonstrate my development as an artist not just technically, but conceptually.
This series also marked my first exhibition outside of school with the collective Seven Int, and has since continued to be exhibited successfully in professional contexts in Paris. I’ll speak more about this in the next section.
In Unit 3, I continued pushing the boundaries of what I had learned and experienced, deepening my engagement with ritual, fire, incense and sensory embodiment.
I spent long days in the darkroom performing acts of creation. My process was guided by solid practice and a constant research in psychology, spirituality, and art.
I enjoyed this phase so much that I felt somewhat reluctant to move on from it. But I also wanted to take full advantage of the experimental freedom this course offers and of the possibility to expand my visual language.
I found myself at a crossroads: whether to follow the sensory path of incense, or the ancestral element of fire as a broader act of transformation. Eventually, I realised I could do both. There is no wrong path.
I returned to rough experimentation, working with human-made symbols created with fire and incense, from simple shapes to more complex structures. Some pieces didn’t resonate as much, but identifying what wasn’t working clarified what was essential in my earlier works and helped me refine my understanding of intention, unpredictability, composition, and symbolic value.
Some of these “failed” experiments found new resonance after my trip to Japan in March 2025, where I was inspired by the concept of Kintsugi, the philosophy of embracing imperfections and finding beauty in brokenness.
This helped me embrace imperfection not just in the work, but in the arc of my own development. I finally internalised that my cracks, my scars, are an essential part of my practice.
In the latest works and experiments, I felt closer to an integration between intention and unpredictability. My presence is tangible, almost like a charred signature, yet the unpredictability of the process remains central. The incense is still there, but in a supporting role. Our dialogue is alive in the trace.
At this moment, my focus is shifting from scent to texture, from olfaction to touch. That doesn’t mean I’m no longer interested in it. I’m fully aware that my journey has just begun.
As an explorer, I need to investigate all territories to understand them. From that knowledge, I will be in a better position to develop a more complex personal language, and gain deeper understanding of the sensory possibilities and the symbolic/ritual significance of my work.
I believe the works presented in this section form a cohesive body of work that not only demonstrates material progression, but also reveals a deliberate unfolding of conceptual understanding, tracing a systematic enhancement of both technical skills and intellectual clarity.
In less than two years, I have developed from digital to analog, from lens-based to camera-less, from light to combustion. Alongside this material development, the understanding of myself as an artist has deepened and come into focus. I no longer need to question whether I am one, I see the kind of artist I'm becoming.
I no longer make art for it to be beautiful. I make it to reflect, transform, connect. My practice has moved from something purely instinctive and unsure to something ritual, embodied, researched, and communicative.
I created a flip book with the works that are most relevant to my practice at this stage:
I believe that the foundations I’ve built in this time will successfully hold the growth still to come. This is only a chapter of a very long story.
Lo2: Synthesise and critically reflect coherently on your process whilst providing evidence of an active, independent and/or collaborative practice. (AC Process)
After two years of intense process and development, being asked to “synthesise and critically reflect” feels like a bit of an oxymoron. But I’ll try to walk us through how my process has developed into an active practice over these past two years, up until now. Aware (and hopeful) that it will change, evolve, improve, stall, and restart many more times.
As for the themes of my practice, I think I’ve been on this path for a very long time, even before I joined the course.
Since the beginning, I’ve been captivated by the idea of “manifestation,” of making the invisible visible. I’ve spent the past two years investigating what manifestation is, in my research and in my practice.
My impression is that I've been asking the same questions over and over. I just didn’t know it. Or I didn’t dare to really ask them out loud.
Two years ago, in the post Icarus I wrote:
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m flying too close to the sun. Maybe I’ll get burnt. But I ought to give it a try for the beauty of the flight.”
Today I can say: "Oh the flight was beautiful, as was the burn!"
At first, I thought the goal was to find answers to my questions. Soon enough, I realised I wasn’t actually interested in answers. Or rather, that any shadow of an answer only leads to a deeper question, a new investigation. A functioning process, in my experience, is designed to raise questions.
The more my practice developed, the more I understood that its purpose wasn’t resolution, but continuation. And as it evolved, I found that these questions no longer expressed themselves in language. They transformed into actions, rituals, materials, creation.
Unlike other artists, whose work I deeply admire and respect, I’ve never been much inspired by “earthly” matters, such as environmental issues or political discourse. To be clear: I’m not interested in them as an artist... I am indeed very concerned as a person.
I remember saying in class that those questions felt too small, too limited to me (to the disapproval of some). I must be more of an existentialist.
So how can I summarise here the deep, unspeakable questions that have followed me my whole life, and that have haunted humanity for generations before me?
If I were to single out the deep Question that drives my practice, for the sake of this assessment, it would be: “Where do we come from, and where are we going?”
I let my art elaborate on that.
In practical terms, it’s probably more realistic to describe how my process evolved.
When I first started the course, I had an idea of process based on result. My experience as a creative professional included, of course, a phase of brainstorming and experimentation, followed by development, consolidation, and implementation. So I automatically applied this approach to my art making. Except for the fact… that I was not making!
I spent the first couple of weeks of the course trying to understand what was required of me, what I needed to deliver.
Jonathan’s encouragement to go out of our comfort zones, play, take risks, and embrace uncertainty ignited the first fuse to start dismantling this way of processing.
This curious, playful, material exploration radically changed my position within the course and opened the way to a genuine and active practice.
The process I experienced in the darkroom was the real turning point of my journey. It changed everything, not just technically but conceptually and physically.
It transformed me in ways I could never have imagined. It taught me the positive potential of failure. It allowed me to establish a direct, unfiltered relationship with the material. Every image became an unpredictable revelation. I started seeing the work not just as outcome, but as ritual. A co-creation. A dialogue.
My passion for analog photography and darkroom processes also pushed me to learn and invent techniques. I value being self-taught, because it means I allow myself to make mistakes that I wouldn’t dare making otherwise, and they sometimes lead to unexpected discoveries.
Unit 2’s research paper taught me how to establish an informed, critical position in relation to the themes of my practice.
From that moment on, research was no longer something I did outside of practice, it became embedded in it.
I understood that research could exist before the making, during, or after, and that it would shape the essence of the work as much as the materials did.
Unit 2 coincided with a particularly difficult time in my life, but it also marked a deeply transformative moment in my process. That shift is captured in real time in the 3 minute video created for Unit 2 assessment:
It is around this time that I also realised how my process could be holistic. Back in Unit 1, I tended to separate my professional job and my personal life from my artistic practice.
But through my extensive research and work on incense, and the synchronicity of my professional involvement in The Incense Road Experience, I came to understand how deeply interconnected they can be and how in fact they feed off each other.
My travels, professional projects and lived experiences inspire my work, and my work allows me to look at those experiences with new eyes.
Concerning my blog reflections, I’ve never hidden the fact that I am not a fan of public journaling. I genuinely tried to push myself to engage with it, knowing and trusting it was part of the process even if it felt unnatural and uncomfortable. As my practice developed, it became more personal and intimate, but also more structured and functioning. I felt more and more resistant to the blog. I found it annoying and distracting, and I started recording my references and reflections in a more private form. Recognising my own process, rhythm, and methodology was a turning point in my development as an artist, and it freed me from frustration and guilt. I don’t think art needs to be explained. I work with ambiguity, liminality, the unconscious and the unsaid...It's like asking a magician to blog about their magic tricks. And more than that, on a more conceptual level, it's not that I refuse to give away the meaning of my work, but rather that I believe there is a difference between expressing meaning and expressing content. As Duchamp said, meaning arises in the interplay between the work and the viewer. it's not my role to define it, but to open a threshold to deep transformative content. So, while I am saddened that the MA is ending, I’m also sincerely relieved I’ll no longer have to share the mental and emotional processes behind my art-making!
Now, I think an effective way to draw the evolution of my process is through the tutorials with Jonathan:
Tutorial 1: I share my insecurity and performative
tendency, but also how I start to understand that this space (the MA) is different. I express the need to reclaim my
creative space and my voice. I still have a hard time
identifying as an artist and evoke the possibility of
adopting a persona to bypass my psychological
barriers/blocks. I also use the word “ritual” in relation to
my work for the first time.
·
Tutorial 2: I reflect on the shift from a performative, anxiety-driven mode toward a more grounded and embodied practice, rooted in the darkroom and in sensory, material engagement. The conversation explores the tensions between performance and experimentation, the symbolic and physical power of materials, and the emerging focus of my practice on ritual, unconscious processes, and sensory dimensions (particularly scent and touch) as vital pathways for my art-making.
As mentioned, Unit 2 was a particularly difficult time, both personally and creatively, but it also forced important shifts in my process, setting in motion constructive growth and focusing on issues that needed to be processed and transformed:
Tutorial 3: This tutorial marked a turning point in my process. I explore the relation to my anxiety but also begin to reframe failure as a catalyst for growth, and to truly embrace uncertainty not as a threat but as fertile ground for transformation. I come to recognise the importance of consistency, flexibility, and kindness within my artistic practice. I start to really understand who I am and why I do what I do.
·
Tutorial 4: The practice becomes more and more focused. I reflect on how recent personal difficulties, the shifting sense of scale brought on by grief, and the darkroom’s ritual process have deepened my practice and clarified my direction. My current work is no longer about outcome but process. Playful, embodied, sensorial. JK and I discuss how the incense-based series, rich in conceptual and aesthetic depth, has the potential to evolve into installations, cross-sensory experiments, and site-responsive forms that will keep growing beyond the MA.
In Unit 3, I managed to refine my process further and use it to stir it in the direction I want the work to go, embracing failure without fear and integrating intention with unpredictability.
Tutorial 5: This session helped me see some of the strengths in my work that I had been overlooking, especially around the physicality and ritual of my combustion process. We touched on everything from colour experiments and symbolic imagery to the tension between intention and unpredictability, and it left me thinking about how I can translate the intensity and embodiment of the darkroom experience into something sensory, shareable and meaningful for the final show.
Tutorial 6: In this final tutorial, Jonathan and I look at my overall development with satisfaction and curiosity for the future. How the materiality and ritual in my work have grown richer and more complex, and how deeply personal and healing this process has become for me. We discuss my experience in recent exhibitions in Paris and the upcoming final show, where I’m creating a site-specific, process-focused installation.
Looking ahead, we also speak about how my practice may evolve in Morocco, potentially opening a new phase in my work.
A crucial element to my development during the course has been the human one. The support, exchanges, challenges, and collaborations with my peers have been a constant source of encouragement, insight, and creative growth.
Joining the collective Seven Int. with Karen, Daniel, Holly, George, Ben and Karl in the summer between Year 1 and 2 was especially relevant in my development.
It expanded my perspective beyond the solitude of the studio, encouraging dialogue, risk-taking, and a deeper sense of community and collaboration.
Our first exhibition together (and my very first exhibition outside school) took place in Belfast in early February 2025.
This experience made me realise to what extent sharing the work is fundamentally part of the process.
It allows the work to be tested, challenged, to grow and evolve...and also to be let free.
Since that first exhibition, I’ve participated in several shows in Paris, where I’m now an active member of the artistic community.
I plan to keep participating to group shows and at some point find a gallery, but also to collaborate and organise festivals and art events with other artists.
These exhibition experiences, along with my conversations with Jonathan about the behaviour of space and artworks, largely influenced my ideas for the final show.
I want my installation to reflect my process, and give it an immersive, sensory touch.
I’ve reflected in depth about the behaviour of the work in the space assigned to us. It’s rough, there’s no lighting, it’s normally used as artists’ studios.
So I asked myself: "How can I respond to the space while staying true to the essence of my work?"
I want to keep it simple but smart: I’ve designed a set-up using industrial metal sheets, like the ones used in darkrooms to hang prints.
I’ll hang the work on these metal panels with magnets. The composition will feature digital prints, original positives, sketches/scribbles, incense samples…
Ideally, it will be a corner space: intimate, immersive, evoking the feel of a darkroom. Two panels per side (100x200 cm or 125x250 cm). The installation will include fragments, thoughts, traces of my journey at Central Saint Martins… glimpses of process.
Every element has meaning. Every choice comes from practice.
As Jonathan commented, all these little details make sense, they have a story. And it all feels very right.
Lo 3: Summarise and evaluate your overall progress and formulate a constructive plan for continuing Personal and Professional Development. (AC Communication)
As I said at the beginning of this assignment, this was a journey of awareness.
I tried to capture this in my 5-minute video:
I feel this course has taken me through a full cycle of growth. To use a botanical metaphor: Unit 1 was about setting seeds. It was chaotic, playful, at times random, but full of faith that something beautiful would eventually sprout. I was unsure where I was going, but I was open to be nourished.
Unit 2 was the root stage. Deep, dark, difficult. A time of resistance, pushing beneath the surface, and breaking through the hard surface of old ideas. Painful at times, but necessary.
Unit 3 has been a fragile but inevitable blooming. A period of emergence, of delicate confidence, of recognising that what I’ve nurtured can now stand on its own.
It’s not easy to summarise such an intense, layered process of development.
I’ve changed, not only as an artist but as a person. My way of working has evolved from scattered, purely instinctive experiments to a grounded, deliberate, active practice. I’ve acquired new skills and deepened old ones. I’ve learnt to listen and to trust. I’ve abandoned a result-oriented mindset for a more fruitful one of process. I’ve let go of the need to be certain and embraced the boundlessness of not knowing.
The most important evaluation for me is that I now have the tools to continue growing and developing as an artist and an art professional.
And that doesn’t mean continuing alone.
This MA didn’t just teach me how to walk with my own legs, it taught me how to connect and collaborate. With others, with my research, with my own creative process.
Moving forward, my intention is to keep developing my practice exploring further the role of ritual and the territory of the unconscious in artistic form.
I plan to apply to artist residencies that can keep alive the sense of trust, experimentation, and shared vision I experienced during the MA.
I will adopt an attitude of continuous learning through specialised workshops and art events, starting with Experimental Photo Festival in Barcelona this summer.
I will continue exhibiting my work to new audiences, potentially introducing performative elements of collective ritual, and expanding my artistic community all over the world.
Collaboration has always been, and will remain, an important part of my creative process.
Seven Int is a treasure, and I am confident we will continue to build projects and bridges together. We already have two exhibitions scheduled in the coming months: one at the Down Arts Centre in Northern Ireland this July, and another at the Museum of Water and Steam in London later this autumn.
In parallel, I want to continue growing not just as an artist but in my other creative roles too, particularly as artistic director and (possibly) curator.
The holistic nature of my practice allows me to move with ease between conceiving, making, developing, and enabling, with great clarity and enthusiasm. Thanks to the experience in this MA, these different aspects of who I am, now dialogue with each other rather than compete.
Most of next year will be dedicated to building the foundations for a long-held dream: opening a hybrid cultural space in Morocco.
A place for the arts in the widest sense. A home for improbable dialogues, audacious experiments, artist residencies, multidisciplinary events, and opportunities for real connection and transformation. A space that nourishes both self and collective. A space where I hope to see some familiar faces very soon!
I finish this MA with a resilient confidence. Not because I’ve figured everything out, but because I now trust the process. I know where to start, what questions to ask, how to keep going when things fall apart. I know how to transform and be born again.
A huge thank you to Jonathan, to Karen, Daniel, Holly, Ben, George and Karl and to all the people who accompanied me on this journey.
This End is just the beginning. Stay tuned…
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