ABOUT
Marika is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Oklahoma State University, where she teaches Printmaking and Foundations. As a printmaker, she uses collage to explore hybridity and change through the lens of animal biology. Her work combines elements from scientific photographs, hand-drawn imagery, and digitally altered print ephemera to create abstract, biomorphic compositions. She earned her M.F.A in Studio Art from the University of Kentucky School of Art and Visual Studies in 2022. Her work has recently been exhibited nationally at Highpoint Center for Printmaking (Minneapolis, MN), the Morgan Conservatory (Cleveland, OH), and PrintAustin (Austin, TX). She has completed artist residencies at Constellation Studios in Lincoln, NE and Chroma Print Residency in Albuquerque, NM.
As a printmaker, I use collage to examine how animals adapt, change, and survive. I work with imagery from scientific photographs, hand-drawn forms, and digitally manipulated print ephemera to create abstract, biomorphic compositions. I’m especially interested in organisms that feel “alien” to us—parasites, jellyfish, fungi—and how they unsettle human assumptions about the body and the natural world. Ideas from popular science and feminist thought help me think about how non-human life can offer new ways of understanding change in an era of environmental disruption.
My prints, installations, and artist books are characterized by a graphic sense of color, pattern, and design. I draw on the aesthetics of microscopic life, using symmetry and repetition to structure my work. Digital tools let me echo the algorithmic logic of natural forms, while printmaking introduces subtle shifts and imperfections, much like variations within a species. When I install my prints in space, I extend collage onto the wall to highlight their material presence and create environments that evoke parasitism, symbiosis, and mutation.