Endangered species are in the forefront of my mind as the impact of humanity encroaches on their lives, their mere existence imperiled. As a means to address this world-wide urgency and my wishing to express it, I am doing a series of unique 12" square prints. Each print is mixed media...chine collé, lithograph, collage, & hand coloring. These prints follow years of including horses in my paintings and prints. Horses, especially those in the wild, are another species loosing ground.

(Marian Bingham, 2023)

Marian Bingham’s is a richly evocative art in which the horse plays a central role. Her work, furthermore, is characterized by the application of sensual colorations, virtuosic use of transparency techniques, the engagement of collage and frottage effects producing layered sensations, an attentiveness to edge values, and the exercising of simultaneity that evokes trance-like sense perceptions. These qualities, in turn, promote a mood of quiescent awareness that suggests feelings of suspension from waking-reality.

Bingham uses her horse motif in real, symbolic, and in imaginary terms and depicts the various contexts in which one might come across the equine image and equestrian image (in, say, cloud formations, hillside terrains, fields, forests, rural village settings and racetracks) as a means of re-inhabiting her own experience.

The artist is a pictorial dramatist who explores the numinous in her work. In order to invoke a transcendent order, Bingham has developed several pictorial strategies and contextual settings. Her passionately introspective artworks have again and again; for many years now, been focused on the image of the equestrian (as associational trigger) that is depicted in the wild or in more domesticated settings.

Using canvas and paper that is often collaged on to linen or canvas, as well as differing textured surfaces, Marian Bingham’s pictorial structures suggest the shaping, bracketing, displacement, and suspension of temporal conditions by inferring box- framing and by her adept use of layered superimposition. The artist’s pictorial and compositional devices typically play out the window metaphor (seeing through time) with the framing metaphor (seeing /being in or out of time), prioritizing one over the other, as is warranted or at times creating congruency between the two.

Through her horse imagery the artist evokes intuitiveness that is absolute mindfulness, and contrasts it with intellective awareness shaped by reason, facts, and historical contexts. Most importantly the horse, as a symbolic, mythic and metaphoric entity serves as means for Miriam Bingham to tell her nuanced stories at a gallop. She rides her steed- her imagination- with cool yet passionate abandon.

(Dominique Nahas)