Marleigh Belsley’s practice traces the impact of digital technology on our understanding of ourselves, each other, and our environment.
Her work explores what - on a microscopic level - happens through the process of sound and image capture, and how this can begin to reveal the complexly intertwined systems of the climate crisis and digital technology.
Working across analogue and digital video, photography, and sound, she investigates each medium's distinct temporal and material presence. Techniques including hand-processed film, 16mm direct animation, digital video distortion, field recording, analogue tape manipulation, and electronic music composition expose the moments where media become unstable, revealing the infrastructures, material histories, and environments that underpin them.
Her work considers how technological mediation reshapes perception. Rather than positioning technology outside nature, she approaches digital systems as ecological systems embedded within networks of extraction, energy, and material exchange. Analogue and digital processes unfold alongside one another as interconnected rather than opposing ways of making.
Time operates as both subject and material. Her works frequently linger within moments of delay, loop, freezing, and accumulation, resisting the seamless speed of contemporary digital media. Images fracture across reflective surfaces, remain suspended between movement and stillness, or pass through successive layers of translation that foreground their material construction. Rather than concealing the apparatus of image-making, these processes reveal the conditions through which images are produced and experienced.
Belsley invites sustained attention to the overlooked materiality of media. Her work proposes alternate modes of engaging with media that open space for reflecting on perception, environmental change, and the digital infrastructures that shape everyday experience.
Marleigh Belsley (b. Chicago, IL 2001) is an artist based between New York and London. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art (2025). She earned her BA in Studio Art and Music at Harvard (Summa Cum Laude, 2024). With a background in both sonic and visual arts, she studied Music Technology at Berklee College of Music (dual enrollment 2020-2024) and earned a certificate in Contemporary Music Production and Critique from IRCAM Centre Pompidou (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique).
instagram: marleigh.belsley
email: mobelsley@gmail.com
Group Exhibitions
2026 Bemis Center, Benefit Art Auction Exhibition, Omaha NE (forthcoming)
2026 Koppel Projects, Eternal Return, London UK
2026 Three Rooms Gallery, A System at Scale, London UK
2026 LRC Space, Beyond is All Abyss, New York NY
2026 Bushwick Gallery, Held in Reflection, Brooklyn NY
2025 Fridman Gallery, New Ear Festival, New York NY
2025 Asylum Chapel for London Design Festival, Kaalchakra, London UK
2025 Sewu Satu for Art Jakarta, PLUNGE, Jarkarta IDSA
2025 Cubitt Gallery, AfterSense, London UK
2025 Filet Space, Kitchen Fire, London UK
2025 Gensis Cinema, AfterSense, London UK
2025 Montez Press Radio, AfterSense, London UK
2025 56 Dawes Rd, Hold Up the Heavens, The Dwelling Place, London UK
2024 Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Opening Reception, Cambridge MA
2024 The Signet Society of Arts and Letters, The Signet Past and Present, Cambridge MA
2024 Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Materials of Intimacy, Cambridge MA
2023 Maven Art House, Eden: The Birth of Spring, New York NY
Awards
2025 Relax Digital Commission, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS
2024 John Knowles Paine Fellowship, Harvard Music Department
2024 Hoopes Prize, Harvard College
2023 Sydney Williams Jr. Traveling Fellowship, Harvard Visual Arts Department
2022 Detur Book Prize, Harvard College
2022 Martello Award, Cinque Ports International Documentary Film Festival
2019 Johnathan Slater Visual Arts Award, Latin School of Chicago
2019 Mark Neville Literary Award, Latin School of Chicago
Residencies
2026 Artist in Residence, Björkö Konstnod, Björkö, Sweden
2026 Artist in Residence, Bushwick Gallery, Brooklyn NY