Marisa Maré

Marisa Maré is an artist and educator from the Western Cape who investigates the pressing issues related to climate change.

As a leader in the arts education space she has actively developed her students' awareness of climate change issues through various educational initiatives. This included participation in the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Programme, collaboration with the WWF, and planning and presenting a webinar titled Drought in South Africa: Resilience in the Face of Climate Change. Marisa has won the Bow Seat global Educator Innovation Award for two years.

More recently, she has turned her focus to her visual arts practice completing a Master's degree in Visual Arts at the University of Johannesburg with distinction. Her dissertation and exhibition titled Making and Unmaking: Plastic Matters explored themes such as grieving ecological loss, and developing empathy with nonhumans. In her exploration of the creative and destructive potential of plastic, Maré has developed bioplastic from natural and agricultural waste materials, utilising them as art materials for her experimental works. She documents the degradation of these bioplastic sculptures through photographic and microscopic imaging to raise questions about the possibility of 'touching the Earth lightly'. Through her creative process, she aims to uncover how her choice of medium is entangled with an extensive web of environmental factors. To some extent, her sculptures and the microbesaiding in their decay are ‘performers’ with agency beyond the artist’s control that render the entangled materiality visible.

In earlier bodies of work, she has been concerned with the impermanence and transience of her art materials. In an exhibition titled Symptoms, she created an installation that included sculptural works with hand-made paper, gauze, rust and salt which pointed to 'symptoms' that are indexical of broader societal concerns.