A CONVERSATION with MARIONNE CONTRERAS


Time is tactile in Marionne Contreras’ studio. As an artist who has crafted beauty through hard materials for the past years, the textiles, tapestries, and sculptures she has constructed for past art exhibitions all contain a part of who she is and her response to the world at a particular moment in time. 

Her day to day experiences shape her ever-evolving work, even in her textile designs for the Earthbound II collection. As she shares her eco-printed textiles once again for ArteFino 2025, she sits down with Idyllic Summers to talk about her journey as an artist and how her experiences have molded her work:


01

Tell me about your formative years as an artist. Where did it all start for you?

I’ve always known I was creative, even from a young age. But growing up in a small town, the options felt binary—if you were academically inclined, you became a doctor or an engineer or whatever it is that would look good in a congratulatory tarpaulin. So I followed that path for a while. I studied civil engineering, then dentistry. I was capable in both, and there were aspects I enjoyed, but they never truly excited me. There wasn’t much room to question or reimagine things. I think I’ve always craved the kind of mental and emotional engagement that comes from building something new—something that didn’t exist before, at least for me.

Eventually, I made the decision to dedicate my time fully to art. I didn’t take Fine Arts anymore—I felt I had studied enough. I also took a short course in fashion design and pattern-making, to add to that. I’d explored enough fields to realize that the kind of education I needed to pursue a life in art wasn’t something I would find in a classroom.

My early art practice reflected all of the fields I found myself in, which added another layer to how I understand structure and material. It was sculptural, grounded in hard materials like fiberglass and found objects. A lot of it was process-driven, very much like dentistry or engineering. It involved repetition, measurement, and systems. That kind of structure continues to shape how I work today.

After giving birth to my first child, I began focusing solely on fabric and fiber. Textile work—especially eco-printing—is still very methodical. It’s not just craft; it’s a negotiation between nature, chemistry, and chance. What I’ve realized is that I’m drawn to disciplines where the hand meets structure—where the material teaches you as much as you shape it.

Looking back, nothing was a linear progression, but each step makes sense—every path has converged to what my practice is now. I didn’t impose a plan or hold onto a fixed idea of what kind of work I wanted to do—I simply responded to what was happening in my life. And that responsiveness is always at the core of my practice. It’s how I stay present, both as an artist and as a person.


02

What lies at the core of your practice? In your art, there are themes of womanhood, femininity and motherhood, and personal experiences that you frequently respond to.



At the core of my practice is a language of refusal—a refusal to settle into a single configuration or definition, because my experience doesn’t either.

Much of what I do emerges unintentionally. I don’t always set out to explore womanhood or identity in a deliberate way—it’s more that I’m responding to what’s happening around me, or within me. And because of that, I think the themes emerge naturally.

What’s unusual, maybe, is that my work doesn’t rely on one fixed visual style. Many artists develop a very recognizable signature, and there’s great value in that. But in my case, you often need a wider lens to see the through-line. I shift between materials and aesthetics—textile work, tapestry, sculpture. One piece might be colorful and expressive, the next muted and restrained. I do repeat certain techniques—I have my mannerisms and tells, little secrets I scatter in the work—but I’m really driven by a need to stay mentally and emotionally stimulated. I’ve said before that I’m building my own language, except it’s visual—and like any language, it has its own rhythms, structures, and registers.

My art practice has been unconsciously rooted in using discards and refuse materials. I have actually just fully grasped and realized this when I started eco-printing, and then working with Steffi and Geraldine for Earthbound. Beyond Earthbound advocating for sustainability, I think my practice was shaped by practicality and the importance of labor in art production. If a work would involve a multi-process backbone, I would probably be all for it. I see labor and attention to detail as a language of care, and a work with foundations of care may be silent but it will never not be a powerful one.

So I move fluidly across forms, switching codes depending on what the work needs. That kind of fluidity mirrors how I move through the world—especially as a woman, as a mother, as someone who’s used to navigating different expectations and pushing against them. The work is personal in that sense, because it comes from the way I experience and absorb things.

I think I’ve been defiant for as long as I can remember—just ask my mother. I became aware of bias and expectations early on, and I’ve always insisted on seeing the world through my own eyes. But I also know that my eyes aren’t always reliable. So while I respond from instinct, I’m also opening myself up—to question what I know, to be changed by what I encounter. My refusal isn’t just outward—it’s directed inward too. If I’m committed to questioning everything, that includes myself, sometimes even more so. That willingness to stay porous, to not hold all the answers, that is just as central to my practice as any material or theme I work with.




03

So, your art is deeply rooted in your personal experiences in life. How have your experiences shaped your work?

It’s hard to be a female artist, first of all. Then it’s also hard to be a textile artist. And now, a mother-artist.

I think most people understand that the art world, like many systems, can be selective—by gender, background, status.  When I became a mother, I felt that more sharply. But I didn’t suddenly become a different person when I became a mother. I was still an artist, a partner, a daughter—a woman still carrying a teenager's baggage, a young adult’s uncertainty, an aged soul's exhaustion. I am still someone with work to do and ideas I hadn’t yet made real. So I kept going. I didn’t want motherhood to be the thing that softened the edges of the work, or slowed its reach. If anything, it made me double down—not to prove something outwardly, but to hold myself to a sharper standard. I wasn’t defending against doubt. I was refusing to let anyone—including myself—lower the bar.

If anything, motherhood didn’t soften my practice—it made it more exacting. It made me tougher. My work ethic has never been stronger. I’ve learned to manage my time with precision, because everything now has to fit into a schedule. Every decision, every movement, has to count—or it doesn’t make it in. There’s no luxury for the unnecessary. I’ve developed a sharper respect for the invisible architecture behind each piece—the planning, the discipline, the labor that holds the visible form together.

But I’m not doing all this to prove a point. I’m not trying to perform resilience. In fact, I've never been more appreciative of the help and support the people around me provide. I just want to arrive at the work with nothing held back—to make sure that when I look back, there are no what-ifs, no corners I walked around instead of through.




04

Can you walk me through what your creative process is like? The form and the process seems to be very important when the team was all creating Earthbound.

When I talk about my creative process, I often say: the poetry is where I exhaust my emotions. But with the visual work—especially textiles—I become almost surgical. I shift into a mode that’s quiet, methodical, controlled. Even the room I leave for spontaneity is measured.

If I’m emotional, it shows up in the writing. That’s where things are allowed to unravel. But in the visual work, I operate with restraint. I tend to work abstractly, favoring form over narrative, because I’m drawn to the idea that beauty—form itself—can be meaning enough. Beauty has always been the origin of art, and even now, I think it still holds its own kind of radical weight. In a time when art is often expected to explain or justify itself, I think there’s something powerful in letting form be. It doesn’t always need a metaphor to matter.

That’s why, in what I do, process is essential—but I also work toward a kind of disappearance of process. I want the work to be able to exist entirely on its own terms. It should be self-sustaining. It should carry itself—with me or without me, with or without the audience knowing how it was made, or who made it. If it can do that, then it has a kind of agency. It lives beyond its context.



Images by Marionne Contreras


05

What was it like entering the collaborative process with Steffi Cua? Unlike being a solo artist, the work doesn’t finish with you, at some point you pass it onto her.

Making clothes is like working in a completely different dimension. It added a new layer to my practice—one I didn’t fully anticipate. As artists, we can become obsessive. Sometimes we get so particular about the result that we lose perspective. The work might have already found its own language, but we keep pushing, questioning, reshaping. And that kind of obsession can start to consume us.

But then Steffi takes the textile and turns it into a garment. Something shifts. Seeing the material in a different form, in a new treatment, confronts me with the fact that the work was already legible, that it didn’t need to be overworked to be understood. Its transformation isn’t just aesthetic; It becomes a reorientation. A shift in authorship, but also in perception. That kind of clarity humbles you. It also puts you in your place.

At some point, the printed textile stopped being the final form. It became a phase in a longer process. Even the scraps—what I might’ve dismissed or thrown away—she turns into something beautiful. That’s when I realized how much trust was forming in the collaboration. Even when I think a print didn’t work, Steffi still finds something in it. So I forward everything to her—even the parts I once would’ve edited out. 




06

What is fashion to you?

I grew up wearing hand-me-downs. I remember seeing other kids in clothes I wanted—things we couldn’t afford—and learning, early on, that I had to work with whatever I had. That made resourcefulness second nature. Not in a romantic way, just a practical one.

In a way, fashion became meaningful to me because of that lack. Scarcity sharpened my creativity. It gave me constraint, which shaped how I would eventually respond—to work, to life, to limitation itself. Looking back, I’m thankful I didn’t grow up with fast fashion. I learned how to value things better. I learned how to present myself with intention. Clothes speak before you do. They declare something—about your values, your boundaries, or your refusal to be read too easily.

I don’t enjoy crowds. I prefer to be unapproachably well put together. It’s not performance—it’s protection. Fashion, to me, is a kind of structure. A shield bubble. A way of setting the terms of perception before anyone else can impose theirs. It establishes distance. It carries information without asking for interaction. It keeps my edges nicely fenced.




This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Interview by Patricia Villoria

© 2025, Idyllic Summers