Welcome to my studio

Hi, I’m Mariette Moor, welcome to my digital studio.

My physical studio is currently my bed, a markedly horizontal departure from my previous setup which operated from a strictly upright position: working with all kinds of sculptural materials, disappearing into intensive drawing stints, and collaborating with some wonderful people. 

I’m now experimenting with how to make work while stuck inside with a chronic illness that has, over the last two years, shrunk my world to a very small square footage. My practice has continued to develop, but only in my head, which turns out to be a very interesting, if pretty repetitive, place.

My previous research into horror, intimacy, and scale now seems eerily connected to my current circumstances. During this residency, I’ll be considering how my relationship with these subjects, particularly scale, has shifted since living in a body and home shaped by intertwined care roles and health conditions.

Thanks for taking a look. Feel free to get in touch.

Warm wishes,

Mm x

FOSSILS

Close-up of a glossy bright yellow sculptural tube, most likely from some industrial structure, with a small fly resting on the edge, covered in the glossy yellow paint.
Further close up of the previous image, a fruit fly is forever moulded to a bright yellow structure as it has been covered in its yellow finish. The entire body is visible in the middle of the image, wings, legs and all.
A daddy long-leg preserved in yellow resin, with its long legs stretching across the image. Also visible is other fragments, bubbles and organic traces.

1. TreePupper, r/WellthatSucks/, Reddit, This fly forgot to fly Away. 1y ago. Access Online.

2. Detailed Fossil Daddy Long-leg and Ant in Baltic Amber, 44 Million Years Old, Kaliningrad Russia.

LOWERING HAND

‘I am alert to small moving things, and spin around toward a floating dust mote. I am alert to darker spots against a lighter background, but these are only the roses on my pillowcase… The stillness of death. When the small creature does not move away from the lowering hand… In the cardboard trap, five or six of them are stuck-frozen at odd angles, alive with an uncanny stillness, in this box like a child’s miniature theatre… The white autumn light in the afternoon. They sleep behind a child’s drawings on the kitchen wall. I tap each piece of paper and they burst out from the edges of pictures that are already filled with shooting stars, missiles, machine guns, land mines…’

Excerpt from Cockroaches in Autumn – Lydia Davis

A close up photograph of small dark fruit flies, stuck or walking on a lime green surface that crosses the image. It is unclear if the green shape is fly tape or a tube, but fluorescent turquoise lights in the background colour the image in an unreliable fashion.
Photo by Andrew Kernan
A close up of abstract colours, light blue, dark blue and shades between. It is as if an insect has been drawn across these thick paints, fine tracks left behind by his passage.
Traces of an insect walking through the paint, July 1889, a detail from Van Gogh’s Olive Grove.

thinking about

I’m thinking about the difference between painting over something, wrapping it, compressing it, binding, embalming or mummifying it, and all the skins these produced. I’m thinking about how unusual harvestmen/daddy long legs are. I’m thinking about looking away, looking downwards, and eradicating hiding spots. I’m thinking about eyes that muddy, magnify, or mosaic. I’m thinking about what the opposite of sky view is. I’m thinking about how long I’d have to stay sealed to a wall for my heart rate to stop objecting to my upright position and accept a new orientation. I’m thinking about how porous skin is, and how sponges are usually the dirtiest thing in a kitchen. I’m thinking about the ice pack I’m about to press to my forehead, the ice machine supporting my dad’s knee post-butchering, the frozen peas on my mum’s face. I’m thinking about how insects like bees and ants clean each other, licking each other’s wounds and scraping parasites or spores off their bodies before they can hurt the whole, but then termites seal the sick within individual burial tombs. I’m thinking about isolation, about illness, about how I skirt around them because I’m scared they’ll swallow even more parts of me. I’m thinking about Clarice Lispector and how she understood that the most minuscule objects can completely unravel us. I’m thinking about how I want my access support artist, Steph, to help me wrap my feet in dough on Saturday or work out how to turn a Reddit thread into a song. I’m thinking about how actually I need her to help me finish my PIP application. I’m thinking about what I really really want her to do – wash my hair, hoover under my bed, and hand-wash my compression garments. I’m thinking about dust as always. I’m thinking about how long I want to spend editing this.

Sepia-toned photograph of the Shroud of Turin, showing front and back impressions of a human figure, faintly visible across the length of cloth.
The Shroud of Turin, 1978, Barrie M Schwortz Collection.
Close-up photograph of the translucent, amber-coloured larval stage of a black vine weevil, lying on dark soil with its legs and segmented body clearly visible curled up.
The Larval/Pupa stage of a Black Vine Weevil, 2024, Robert Heemskrerk.

HEAD ONLY

The floor is covered in shit, but it’s the end of my shift. I’m in a tall, worn service elevator that can comfortably fit multiple gurneys lined up in a row. It’s essential I get to the deepest basement level to clock out as soon as possible, but the lift is completely stationary. The doors are not jolting towards each other, or even whirring, to signal that they still have the capacity to do so.

Between the silent, gaping doors and the extensive yet entirely unresponsive button board to the left, the side panel is interrupted by a second, much smaller set of doors, with flashing lettering above: ‘HEAD ONLY’. Am I allowed? I’ve never properly inspected it before, and there are no buttons to speak of, but it looks operational, and fast.

It opens, revealing a clean, rectangular niche. It’s straightforward to position my head inside – my body so irrelevant that there isn’t even a scene of decapitation. I spare it no thought as the doors seal shut behind me. 

I can’t see much with my eyes pressed up against the wall, I hear metallic grinding and releasing noises begin, and harsh lights start to flicker past my periphery. And although I no longer have a stomach, I still feel the continuous jolts that tell me I’m plummeting faster and faster – or at least, my head is. As I drop further, the rectangular space starts to contract around my skull, tightening with every floor that whips by, until I sense the metal groan in its desire to vacuum-pack my face. While it’s not succeeding at warping against every fold of flesh, the pressure is growing unbearable, as is my sense that there’s not enough air to last all the way, and that the bottom is still miles down. Does a head have further to travel on its own? I decide to count, but I keep losing track – I think one floor for an elevator comes to at least twenty for a head. The doors open, and I reassemble without fuss.

‘All Seeing Eye’

A hand reaches through a miniature doorway into a small-scale diorama of a living room, resting on the floor and wearing a blue ring on the third finger. To one side sits a blue armchair, with a wicker dining chair blurred in the foreground. Through a second doorway, a man’s face peers into the model. There is a red and white vase to the right of the doorway, oddly large in relation to the rest of the room.
Pierre Bismuth on the set of The All-Seeing Eye, 2008, Pierre Bismuth & Michel Gondry.

LOOSE GRIP

Two images of hands, covered in pizza dough. The first is splayed out, fingers spread, coming through the top right corner of the image. The second is the a hand coming from the bottom left of the image, a fist with knuckles facing us. Each look as though the hand of a gargoyle has been juxtaposed onto the wrist of a human.

The last post of gathered images reminded me of when I encased my hands in dough for a test shoot for a short film.

MUMMIFIED ROOMMATE

Eight image gallery showing insects in different precarious positions. First a spider painted over a white wall, second and third: two cockroaches painted over a wall, fourth: a grasshopper somehow fossilised in cement, fifth, sixth and seventh: more spiders painted into white walls, and eight: an image of a large number of daddy long legs clustered onto the corner of a ceiling piled on top one another as if to look like a collection of hairy legs.

1. MetalKingFlandango, r/NotMyJob/, Reddit, Guys who painted my shop just straight up painted over this spider. 5y ago. Access Online.

2. Palafitteposide, r/mildlyinteresting/, Reddit, This bug I found painted over on my wall today., 7y ago. Access Online.

3. chelsea, a human woman? @chellzyeah, Twitter, My landlord painted over a fucking roach, 11:39PM Sep 4, 2021. Access Online: Carly Stern, Daily Mail, Texas woman reveals her landlord painted over a COCKROACH on her wall as she shares a hilarious image of her ‘mummified roommate’ – sparking a wave of memes and jokes on Twitter, 8th September 2021.

4. Vincent van Gogh, detail of Olive Trees. Access Online: Mark Brown, Guardian, Dead grasshopper discovered in Vincent van Gogh painting, Wed 8 Nov 2017 18.36 GMT.

5. zestywitchy , r/mildlyinteresting/, Reddit, This spider was painted onto the wall. 10y ago. Access Online.

6. Alarming-Caramel, r/paint/, Reddit, Found a spider painted into a wall in my house. 2y ago. Unknown source. Access Online.

7. ZEROZAFIR , r/mildlyinteresting/, Reddit, This spider got caught in drying paint and died stuck to my wall, rip, 6y ago. Access Online.

8. National Park Service, Harvestmen, also called daddy longlegs, on a building at Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve in Alaska. Access Online: Katherine J Woo, New York Times, Did This Building Grow A Beard? Nope. Those are Legs: Daddy Longlegs will sometimes collect in large groups. Don’t mistake their dangling limbs for fur. Oct 31. 2020.

Audio recording by Papa Moor

’tiled perspective’

Read 06.08.2026 00:48am

“The third story which now begins is called “The Statues.” It begins by saying that I had been complaining about the cockroaches . Then the same woman appears on the scene. And so it goes on to the point where I awake as it is beginning to grow light, and I awake still feeling sleepy and I walk across the kitchen. Even more sleepy is the scullery floor with its tiled perspective. And in the shadows of dawn, there is a purplish hue which distances everything; at my feet, I perceive patches of light and shade, scores of rigid statues scattered everywhere. The cockroaches that have hardened from core to shell. Some are lying upside down. Others arrested in the midst of some movement that will never be completed. In the mouths of some of the cockroaches, there are traces of white powder. I am the first to observe the dawn breaking over Pompei. I know what this night has been, I know about the orgy in the dark. In some, the gypsum has hardened as slowly as in some organic process, and the cockroaches, with ever more tortuous movements, have greedily intensified the night’s pleasures, trying to escape from their insides. Until they turn to stone, in innocent terror and with such, but such an expression of pained reproach. Others— suddenly assailed by their own core, without even having perceived that their inner form was turning to stone!— these are suddenly crystallized, just like a word arrested on someone’s lips: I love . . . The cockroaches, invoking the name of love in vain, sang on a summer’s night. While the cockroach over there, the one with the brown antennae smeared with white, must have realized too late that it had become mummified precisely because it did not know how to use things with the gratuitous grace of the in vain: “It is just that I looked too closely inside myself! It is just that I looked too closely inside . . .”— from my frigid height as a human being, I watch the destruction of a world. Dawn breaks. Here and there, the parched antennae of dead cockroaches quiver in the breeze. The cockerel from the previous story crows.”‘

Excerpt from The Fifth Story – Clarice Spector

Link to full short story

(2014-03-26). Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Stories, Prose, Poems, Brief Essays and Other Short Prose Forms (pp. 121-122). Persea. Kindle Edition.

ceiling, moth & cheese

A single unlit birthday candle sticks out from the top of a closed match box as if it were a cake.
A subtly textured wall with small lumps and marks on it is illuminated by a warm, orange light. The tips of leaves from a house plant creep up at the bottom.
A close up photograph of the interior of a cheese grater, which also looks like a blue toned, futuristic corridor with reflective surfaces and geometric cut outs.

Left: c. mae bloom, Firelights flickering on the ceiling of the world, 2025.

Middle: Foresaken-Werewolf-23, r/mildinginteresting/, Reddit, Peice of plaster on my wall looks like someone painted over a moth or butterfly, 7mo ago

Right: Vince Moriarty, Positive Quotes Diaries, Facebook, Does the inside of a cheese grater qualify as a liminal space? 9 January 2024

Audio recording by Papa Moor

starting point – rejected application snippet

the exterior of a white sash window is boarded up with rough wooden planks, thin strips of daylight are visible through the gaps in the boards, and in the midst of them is a small round glass panel, with a metal rim along the diameter and across the centre.
Federico Arani

‘Votive offerings and talismans, toys (especially transitional objects), small scars, dents or details: the minute holds power far beyond its size. I’m interested in how small-scale things affects the viewer, inviting a sense of play that involves a familiar projection tied to the uncanny. We shrink to fit into a very real yet psychologically activated world while assuming some authority over it. However, what seems endearing “under the thumb” becomes less so when we realise its scale actually limits its visibility.

Small details or objects, particularly animate ones like insects, can be seriously disconcerting – hence why close-ups are so often used in horror films to build tension or foreshadow what’s to come, hinting that the threat is unlikely to be entirely visible, containable or predictable. This capacity to pass unnoticed or remain hidden can also feel intimate – a small mark on a wall, an object tucked into an inside pocket, strung against a chest, or held in a fist.’

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