Marguerite Carnec: Give it Time

Give it time
For George

Marguerite Carnec (b. 1994) is a French artist based in Glasgow. Working across painting, drawing, and printmaking, she explores femininity and the emotional richness of living. Trained in illustration, Carnec is drawn to narrative, allowing stories and characters to emerge organically from abstraction.

Her practice begins with faire le vide - emptying her mind to invite playful improvisation. Inspired by childhood memories of finding images in random shapes, she approaches her monoprinting process without a plan, waiting for forms to reveal themselves. Rolling colour onto metal plates and dissolving figures with solvent, she responds to these spontaneous appearances in a trance-like state, describing it as creating "from the heart."

Music animates her studio, guiding her hand with rhythm and sometimes embedding fragments of poetry in the work. Each print evolves through an iterative process: the first impression is intense and unfiltered, while successive "ghost" prints become calmer and more reflective, mirroring shifting emotional states. Through these layers, Carnec works toward resolving her own inner conflicts, one impression at a time.

Carnec studied Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts (2016) and has exhibited widely across the UK, including Glasgow Print Studio (2025), ShapeeroMurray (Glasgow, 2024), New Glasgow Society (2024), Mall Galleries (London, 2024), Somerset House (London, 2017), Copeland Gallery (London, 2016) and Woolwich Print Fair (2018). Her work has been published in Illustration Research Methods (Bloomsbury, 2021), Varoom (2017), and The Jackdaw (2017). She was commissioned to create a series of 15 drawings to illustrate the Greek classic 'Metamorphosis, by Ovid' for the French publishing house Les Belles Lettres
in 2019.