Marcy Petit
Sara Vance Artist in Residence

UNDER THE OWL’S EYE

During her 5-week residency at Wave Pool Gallery, Marcy will create a series of installations and a performance that explore the loss — and the reclaiming — of women’s ancestral ties to nature. Drawing from eco-feminist perspectives, folklore, and personal rituals rooted in French-Celtic heritage, this project reimagines forgotten spaces of feminine power, resistance, and healing.

Each piece embodies a symbolic gesture of reclamation: We will keep Watching You presents wood logs marked with feminine eyes — a silent, collective gaze from trees and forest. Passage is a textile piece where prints of flowers and leaves are sewn together with veins of red thread. The Heart of a Witch stages a human ceramic heart pierced with nails — like an old ritual of violence and resilience invoking the power of love and nature. In Dry Flowers are to Remember the Dead, hanging flowers dipped in limestone hover above mirrors resting on beds of dead leaves, creating an altar of memory and mourning. She comes back to me after Dark invites visitors to a shadow projected owl watching us.

The residency will culminate with a performance, reimagined here as a nocturnal ritual of remembrance. Wearing the head of an owl — the symbol of her grand-mother but also a creature of wisdom, mystery, and silent observation — the artist will continuously sweep the floor while a personal text dedicated to her grandmother is being read aloud. Through her story, she will evoke a generation of women who once held ancestral knowledge — connected to plants, rituals, the land — and who gradually lost this wisdom through time, societal shifts, and capitalist transformations.

Together, these works create a fragile yet defiant landscape — a space haunted by what has been lost, but fiercely alive with what can still be reclaimed.