Rory Bakker-Marshall (b. 2002) is an artist living and working in London who seeks to challenge reductive modes of looking and engage diverse subject positions by suspending their scenes within a mineral, elemental, obscurity. She takes a sculptural approach to all mediums, conjuring vacant rooms warped through repetitive layering and transfer. Motifs of folds and interiors recall aesthetics associated with old-world sculpture, but Rory is not longing for the past; rather, it is the slow rhythm of dreams these processes evoke, and her vehicle toward a non-representational, non-binary affect. The city’s continually overlapping cycles of creation and decay remain a major source of inspiration and material. Translation, transference, repetition, and reuse are integral to her material process, both practically and methodologically. Using debris from the urban environment allows her to collect and assemble evidence of a world defined by disposable material, with these objects acting as time markers and symbols within a wider material history. Reproductive methods of musical notation and scoring are treated as material, compressed and translated into structures where she tests the relationships between repetition and decay.
Rory is particularly interested in the fragmentation of modern life as it is felt in dense urban environments, where temporal asymmetries between objects and buildings are more pronounced. She approaches fragmentation not as a tragedy but as a space of increased density, where new forms and meanings emerge. Assemblage methods relate closely to her material decisions, and she finds that reuse and chance encounters with materials help uncover the peculiar harmonies or synchronicities that emerge through compression. Her frame of reference sits within Western histories of space and music, which she approaches with analytical curiosity. Through reappropriation and reconfiguration of the structures these histories impose, meanings are allowed to form more intimately, through sustained attention.
Rory graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2024 and has exhibited works at The Crypt Gallery, The Horse Hospital, and Kiosk N1C in London. Their debut curatorial role took place at the historic Millbank Tower in April 2025.