Marcia Kure is an artist and researcher working between Nigeria and the United States. Her practice repositions drawing as a system of inscription, engaging material, infrastructure, and systems of circulation across bodies, land, and networks of exchange.

Marcia Kure is known for expanding drawing beyond surface into a networked system shaped by material histories, trade, migration, and systems of power.

Marcia Kure works with materials including indigo, kola nut, charcoal, tea, gold, synthetic hair, wood, wax, and paper. These materials are selected not only for their physical properties but for the histories of cultivation, trade, labor, extraction, and circulation they carry.

Indigo holds histories of cultivation and trade. Kola nut operates as stimulant and exchange. Synthetic hair circulates through economies of beauty and labor. Each material arrives already inscribed with movement.

The body operates as a site of accumulation and inscription. It dissolves into substrate, pigment, scar, and trace, registering the pressures exerted by systems of labor, trade, circulation, and infrastructure. The body does not remain stable or singular; it is dispersed across materials, marks, and surfaces, continually reconfigured through its entanglement with historical and material forces.

Time is constitutive. Processes unfold through repetition, duration, exposure, erosion, and accumulation. Pigments bind, fibers shift, and materials settle over time, allowing the work to emerge through temporal layering across material systems. Histories remain embedded within marks, surfaces, and substances rather than unfolding as a linear sequence. Time accumulates as pressure within the work.

Material operates as a structuring system. It directs movement, organizes relations, and determines the conditions through which form emerges. Infrastructure is not passive ground but active force, the routes, networks, and systems through which materials, bodies, and histories circulate. In this work, material and infrastructure are inseparable: each substance carries the logistical and historical conditions of its own movement.

Mark-making is not treated as a purely expressive or gestural act. Marks emerge through material process: saturation, pressure, abrasion, incision, binding, and release. Marks remain entangled with the substances, surfaces, and pressures through which they take form. In this sense, mark-making becomes a form of inscription, registering contact between material, surface, force, movement, and time.

Trade and movement enter the work through the line. Lines operate as routes and forms of inscription, appearing as writing, glyphs, systems, and code, tracing the movement of goods, bodies, and information across geographies. They also work through subtraction and incision, emerging as gouge and trace, where removal becomes its own form of marking. These roles are not fixed; they shift and accumulate through material and process.

Drawing operates as a networked system. Marks accumulate across surfaces, materials, and processes, forming fields of relation rather than fixed images. Lines function as routes and forms of inscription, appearing as scars, tattoos, glyphs, scripts, logistical traces, trade routes, migratory paths, and infrastructural marks. Drawing and network share a structural logic in which movement, accumulation, labor, and exchange determine form.

The work engages African systems of inscription, including Nsibidi, Uli, Vai, and Bamum, as epistemic frameworks rather than visual motifs. These systems operate between image and text, gesture and code, informing drawing as relational, performative, and infrastructural. They are approached as structuring logics through which meaning is produced, transmitted, and transformed across material and social systems.

Marks operate as glyphs, scripts, and codes that carry meaning without fixed translation. The work considers how many African and Indigenous systems of inscription remain structurally absent from dominant computational logics and training datasets, revealing the limits through which AI systems organize, transmit, and interpret knowledge.

The work approaches AI as a system of inscription, one that encodes, organizes, and distributes meaning through logics that are neither neutral nor universal. Drawing, as practiced here, operates through systems of mark-making that resist reduction to dominant computational frameworks. The work asks what is transmitted, what is lost, and what remains structurally unreadable within these systems.

Drawing and machine learning both operate as systems that encode and transmit meaning, but through fundamentally different logics. Machine learning organizes knowledge through pattern, repetition, and statistical relation. Drawing, as inscription, moves through pressure, material, duration, and embodied contact. The work holds these systems in tension, examining what each makes legible and what each forecloses.