Imogen Lycett Green meets Alexi Marshall

The winter’s day is grey, enveloped in a dismal gloom. The bad news continues: the Middle East imploding; climate change; Trump making ‘America great again’; another ‘strongman’ voted into power. It feels as if almost every country in this darkening world pretends to work with the others but in reality is either at war or working alone, ‘in the national interest’. It is not difficult to lose hope.

At my desk, I think over my interview with the artist Alexi Marshall. We talked yesterday in her shared studio at the Electro Studios Project Space, a community art space on the seafront at St Leonards-on-sea. We were the last two people in the building, sitting on metal chairs in front of her paint-spattered boiler-suit which hangs beside sketches, water colours and ‘lino-ghosts’, more of which later. Only 29, Sladeeducated, Hastings-based Marshall is already cutting a swathe through the art scene with her gigantic mythical creatures – mandrakes, eels, black dogs, tarot goddesses – rendered almost figuratively but not quite, in greenish blue and reddish hues. She is young, intelligent and energetic. What kind of dark world is waiting for her?

I find that Marshall is not afraid of the dark. In fact, it’s where she finds inspiration. Mythology has attracted her since childhood, particularly the story of Demeter and Persephone. Demeter is the ancient Greek goddess of agriculture and fertility whose beautiful daughter Persephone disappears. So distraught is Demeter that she neglects the crops and the world turns dark and cold. The goddess searches high and low for Persephone, eventually appealing to Zeus, king of the gods, who discovers that the young woman has been abducted by Hades, king of the Underworld. Zeus forces Hades to return Persephone. However, Hades has tricked Persephone into eating six pomegranate seeds, so forever after she is destined to spend six months of the year – one for every seed – in the Underworld as his wife. When Persephone is in the Underworld, it is winter. When Persephone returns to be with her mother, spring begins.

Marshall – whose 2023 show Under the Pomegranate Moon was a fertile breeding ground for new buyers and commissions – is an artist who tracks her own powerful cycle of descent, search and re-emergence every time she makes work. “Before the age of 25, I was pretty destructive,” she tells me. Of relationships? Of places? “Of myself, I went to a dark, dark place,” she says. “But I would make things to emerge again. Only art can do that for me. It became a cycle.” Her underworld adventures bore fruit, for she has exhibited solo five times in the UK and Italy, including at the De La Warr Pavilion. On her website, Marshall writes: “Pomegranates are drenched in heady paradoxes. Juicy, sweet and bitter to the tongue, this fruit is culturally digested as both a symbol of fertility and death.” A curse and a blessing, then. Is she not afraid of death? “Of course I am,” says Marshall, “but without going close to the edge, how can you find the light?” She quotes from Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being: ‘The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfilment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.’

She found a similar metaphor in the story of the eel, one of nature’s most elusive creatures. She lights up as information pours out of her: “Did you know all the eels in the world originate in the Sargasso Sea, then they migrate all over the world to breed and return to the Sargasso to die. They are the embodiment of drive, necessity, compulsion. We don’t even know how they mate, no one has ever seen it. Now, of course they are endangered.” Her series of eel paintings was shown in Nostalgia for the Mud (2024), a solo show at the Brooke Benington gallery in London.

The Sargasso Sea swirls around the Caribbean. “It’s where I’m from,” says Marshall. She is a quarter Irish on her father’s side and half Trinidadian on her mother’s side. Her mother’s family came from Trinidad in the 1990s, strict Catholics with a long tradition of storytelling and magic.

“I grew up in the country at Stonegate, running about on my best friend’s farm. Close to nature, I only ever wanted to dress up as a fairy, to play with the fairies.” She was always painting and drawing, so art school was inevitable.

Has Marshall been to Trinidad? Only twice as a baby. Is she tempted to return? “Of course! Of course!” Like the eel. Peter Doig, of course, part-lives on Trinidad, as does Chris Ofili, though neither artist was born there. Doig was born in Edinburgh, Ofili is British of Nigerian descent. Marshall grew up in a house covered in work made in Trinidad, which her mother, a primary school teacher, had brought from home. “Trinidad & Tobago is a melting pot, settled by indigenous people from South America long before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1498. After the Spanish (where the Catholicism comes from) came the British and the French.”

Brought up a Catholic in a strict household, attending mass, she has always asked questions: What are we doing here? What is life? How did it all begin? A free spirit and the eldest of three, she fought hard against her mother’s rules. “That’s what keeps me going! I’ll never know what the essential mystery is at the heart of creation, but I will keep asking.” The Catholic version of the mystery was of course delivered with blood and crucifixion, violent imagery, a theatrical sense of drama, performance. Does she beat herself up a lot too, like most Catholics I know? “Of course,” she says. “I’m never good enough.”

For all the appetites and brutality, savage opinions and lust of the wayward characters in her work, Alexi Marshall herself is now maturing into a focused and disciplined artist, teaching sixth form at Hastings College as a day job, then working evenings and weekends on her own work. She has developed a unique practice: she makes large-scale linocuts – her pieces may be six or seven feet high – which she then prints by rolling her whole body along the paper. “I have to feel the lino underneath me.” For each colour – there maybe seven or eight in each piece – she must roll again. “I tried to find a press big enough,” she says. But there wasn’t one and now the body imprint, the impression of her own body on the work is part of its magic. “There is magic,” she explains. “Because however much you sketch the piece and plan the colours, there will be smudges and fingerprints and something new at the end of it.” The moment of peeling back the paper after the final colour is a moment of revelation. Akin to birth after a period of gestation? “Yes, it is like birth,” muses Marshall. “You just never know quite how it’s going to turn out.” It is that alchemy, she admits, which reminds her every time of the essential mystery in life. “I get so excited, after all the thinking and sketching and the careful practice, even after all that, I am at the mercy of the work. I relinquish control.”

A print is made only once – or at most, twice. Each one is like a painting, a one-off. She describes her work as ‘linopainting’. Marshall is dancing to her own tune, but cites strong influences. Two important artists in her pantheon are Cuban-American Ana Mendieta, whose New York Times obituary starts: ‘Mendieta’s art, sometimes violent, often unapologetically feminist and usually raw, left an indelible mark before her life was cut short’, and Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón who, tragically, shot herself aged 32. Both artists worked, like Marshall, with their own bodies. The NYT reported Ayón saying: “These [works] are the things I have inside that I toss out because there are burdens with which you cannot live or drag along… perhaps that is what my work is about –that after so many years, I realise the disquiet.”

There are echoes of ‘burdens you cannot live or drag along’ in Marshall’s work with the metaphor of the mandrake. For non-initiates, the mandrake is the root of a Mediterranean plant which contains hallucinogenic properties and, as the shape of the root resembles a human figure, mandrakes have throughout history been associated with ritual. In pagan tradition developed from Dutch and German folklore, the mandrake has become the symbolic representation of your shadow, of your dark side, of your trauma, and can only be pulled out chained to a black dog. Marshall employs this image over and over in her work: a dog chained to a representation of the tortured feminine. I notice, in her early sketches, a sexual relationship between the dog and the woman. She brushes it aside. “Recently, in my work, the woman is riding the dog, she is in control.”

Is Marshall pulling up personal mandrakes in her linopaintings? “Of course,” she says. In the manner of both Medieta and Ayón, her body is imprinted in her work, but she is also protective of the truth of her own early personal family chaos, her own trauma. With each linocut she is laying a ghost. “They are actually called ‘lino ghosts’, because you can’t use the lino afterwards. The ‘ghosts’ are discarded after use. “It’s a release,” she says.

Marshall currently has four pieces in Glyndebourne’s annual Sussex artists exhibition, Fair Ground (until December 15), and will be showing at Towner Eastbourne in the new year. She is finishing a mural in Cambridge and is off on a six-week artist’s residency in Rajasthan, India, in January. “I would love to live by my art,” she says. But she also believes the structure and rigour of teaching keeps her from becoming isolated. “It keeps me sane,” she says. Teaching is her living, and she also delivers bespoke Tarot card print-making workshops (@ peculiar.arcana) for private groups. She reads her own Tarot cards for herself, but knows it is really just an affirmation of already-held beliefs. Referencing a recent health scare she went through, when she had an operation to remove a benign tumour as big as a grapefruit from her womb, she says, “You can try and lay out the future, but things happen, life happens to you.”