ARCHITECTURE OF HUMAN TIES
Marie-Chloé Duval
New Watercolors Installation
February 14 - March 4, 2026
The Union Gallery is pleased to present Architecture of Human Ties, an exhibition bringing
together my latest watercolors from the ongoing series of the same name and a large-scale
installation titled The Walls Were Poems. The exhibition constructs a world where social
structure, organic form, and poetry converge, challenging the traditional boundaries between
academic inquiry and artistic experience.
Marie-Chloé Duval conceives the series Architecture of Human Ties as a meeting ground of
intimacy, vibrant color, shape, and space. The small-scale watercolors invite close looking
on the wall, preserving the immediacy and tactile breath of the medium while figures appear
within subtle architectural and organic forms. These intimate works enter into dialogue with
the large installation The Walls Were Poems, creating an environment in which visitors walk
through the artwork as through a living architecture, engaging physically with fields of color
while encountering the works on the walls at eye level. Rather than illustrating research,
Duval proposes that human bonds are understood by inhabiting the distances between forms
as much as by contemplating them.
The installation The Walls Were Poems was realized during a summer residency at Talamore
Park in Indiana. The work consists of a laser-engraved linen panel bearing original texts
written in dialogue with the visual pieces. The engraved lines operate as corridors and
thresholds, echoing the proportions of rooms and institutions. Visitors encounter the fabric as
a speaking wall — permeable, domestic, and conceptual at once. The piece pays homage to
fiber traditions historically associated with women’s craft while employing contemporary
technical processes to affirm that poetry can be an architecture and that language can become
environment.
Conceptually, the project asks how we inhabit one another and how institutions inhabit us.
What are the invisible contracts that determine belonging? Rather than depicting research, the
exhibition performs it through images, textures, and readings. Programming will include
artist talk and gallery visits with the students.
Architecture of Human Ties proposes that the spaces between us—our junctions, edges, and
thresholds—are not empty, but full of possibility. These works invite viewers to see the
fragility and resilience of our shared systems, and to imagine a more organic architecture of
human connection.
