Biography
Tashina Marie (b. 1985, Arizona, USA) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Tennessee. Her practice encompasses installations, sculpture, traditional painting, photography, and hybrid forms. Rooted in an animistic understanding of the world as relational and alive, her work engages natural, mythic, and oral ways of knowing to create spaces of encounter rather than representation. Through an integrated approach to material, image, and story, her work dissolves perceived separations between land and body, memory and matter, inner and outer worlds.
Working across diverse materials and processes, Marie treats materials as collaborators rather than inert resources, allowing form, texture, and time to guide the work’s unfolding. Her practice draws from lived experience, place-based attention, and long-standing relationships to land, lineage, and making - offering environments where belonging and interconnection can be felt rather than explained.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including juried exhibitions with ADC Fine Art Gallery, Manhattan Arts International (The Healing Power of Art & Artists, 2025; The Healing Power of Color, 2026), MADE for Nashville, and the National Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art & Practices Biennial at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. She has presented solo and featured exhibitions in Tennessee and Hawaiʻi, and her work is held in public and private collections across the United States and Latin America.
Marie received formal training in photography at Sinclair Community College and completed advanced studies in art and sculpture at Middle Tennessee State University. Since 2022, she has been mentored in metal casting, fabrication, and digital processes by Professor Michael Baggerly (ongoing through 2026), and her training includes workshops and conferences with the National Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art & Practices, Mid-South Sculpture Alliance, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and painter Peter Fiore. She is also an active participant in Art NXT Level, an ongoing professional mentorship program led by Sergio Gomez, Dr. Yanina Gomez, and Drew Harris, supporting artists working toward sustained institutional and gallery presence. She is a recipient of the James S. Gibson Sculpture Scholarship and a Windgate Foundation Scholarship, and her practice is further informed by a lifelong apprenticeship under artist Linda L. Anderson.
Artist Statement
"Interwoven Realities: Art as a Bridge Between Nature, Culture, and Belonging"
“In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it.”
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe -
My work is rooted in the understanding that the world is alive, relational, and inseparable. Across sculpture, painting, photography, and installation, I create environments that invite presence—spaces where connection is felt through material, atmosphere, and form rather than explained. Land, light, body, memory, and spirit are approached both as symbols of human experience and as living participants within a shared field of existence.
I draw from animistic traditions, mythic memory, and lived relationship to place, working with materials that carry history, texture, and change within them. These materials hold memory without being confined by it, allowing what has been fractured or weathered to remain open, responsive, and in motion. Light enters the work as a familiar, cultivated presence—something practiced and tended over time—moving through darkness as warmth, orientation, and continuity.
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What emerges is a practice of openness and vitality. The work remains permeable and responsive, attentive to relationship and renewal, grounded in the understanding that life continues to unfold through connection. Presence becomes an active state here—one that listens, adapts, and carries forward what is living rather than what has been lost.
My mission is to restore and sustain a sense of belonging within a living, interconnected world. In a time shaped by fragmentation and commodification, I create spaces that support slowing, listening, and care—places where imagination functions as a form of nourishment and ethical attention. Through this practice, light is not distant or abstract, but something shared and sustained, affirming tenderness, resilience, and relationship as essential ways of living alongside the more-than-human world.
"We are not separate from the universe but integral to its wholeness, though our minds create the illusion of division—a prison of perceived isolation. In truth, the cosmos is within us; we are made of star-stuff, a means for the universe to know itself. Our purpose is to expand our circle of compassion, recognizing our deep connection to all people and experiences, for we are the whole universe, momentarily disguised as individual grains of sand."
- Combination of quotes from Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, and Depok Chopra -