Livia Marin (b. 1973) is an artist who is constantly challenging and expanding her technical repertoire while enquiring into the cultural life and role of material objects. Her work is greatly invested with delicate and almost meditative handmade techniques that intertwine traditional trades (ceramics, restoration, gilding, embroidery) with contemporary means of production (photography, digital image, CNC, silkscreen). The outcome is an intriguing and ambiguous object that appears to the viewer as familiar yet estranged at the same time.
Her work was initially informed by the social and political context of Chile in the 1990s that was defined by a strong neo-liberal economic agenda that slowly but steadily was then erasing local trades and replacing cultural practices and their crafts with the profitability of mass-produced imported goods. Revisiting tradition and devising hybrid-forming processes, her work seeks to offer a reflection on the relationship we develop with those often unseen objects that meet our daily needs. She studied art in Santiago de Chile, completed a PhD in Art in London and attended various workshops in ceramics, gilding, ceramic and textile restoration in the UK and Europe. Marin has exhibited widely both in her native Chile and internationally.