Bee Corps Univers #1

Corps Univers, 2025
180gsm satin silk with ceramics, crystals and shells
19 x 28 x 2cm, unframed
10 unique variations
Please note that, as each edition is handmade, there will be variations to each artwork. 
 
About the work
Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien works with textile, drawing, sculpture, video-performance and installation to explore how ideas of femininity and the cosmos intersect across cultures, generations and materials. Growing up between France, Guadeloupe and Cote d’Ivoire from a young age she was taught contemporary and traditional manual craft techniques by her mother and grandmother. Adapting these traditions and experiences, as well as her Creole heritage, Marie-Claire’s multidisciplinary practice is infused with the materials and ideas surrounding her. Artworks become complex maps of plural identities, diverse ecosystems in which natural and man-made fabrics, shells, votives, metals and everyday objects appear side-by-side as symbolic recompositions.
 
Her edition for Gasworks, Corps Univers incorporates many of these key themes, along with her distinct sensitivity to form and material. Printed onto a fine satin silk is a celestial scene; three gridded spheres representing planets overlap and interplay with orbs, glinting stars, and a far-off horizon. Borrowing from the language and technique of Marie-Claire’s emblematic tapestries, set upon the silk are healing stones of moonstone and amethyst, ceramic shells and female nipples, both hand-cast by Marie-Claire. Cream-coloured shiny cowrie shells take a central position, used as currency for centuries in African cultures, the cowrie shell is regularly used in divination and ceremony by Yoruba communities in West Africa. These cultural, economic, and spiritual objects orbit throughout and within the work, overlapping with Marie-Claire’s perspective on the universes our bodies inhabit.
 
Corps Univers is the first edition Marie-Claire has produced, and each is unique, with a different combination of shells, stones and ceramics, echoing the fact that the universe is constantly in flux.