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 (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique).
She has exhibited at Fridman Gallery, Sewu Satu for Art Jakarta, Asylum Chapel for London Design Festival, Koppel Projects, A Space Gallery, Bushwick Gallery, Cubitt Gallery, Filet Space, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Maven Art House. She has been awarded The John Knowles Paine fellowship from the Harvard Music Department and the Sydney M Williams Jr. Traveling Fellowship from the Harvard Visual Arts Department. Belsley has photographed for organizations such as the New York Times and the Harvard Film Archive. Most recently, Belsley was in residence at The Bushwick Gallery in New York and chosen for the Relax Digital Commission for her work to be displayed in the Chelsea NHS Hospital in London (both 2026).
instagram: marleigh.belsley
email: mobelsley@gmail.com