During a 2015 fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, Bryony Roberts spent a lot of time visiting medieval churches. Inside those spaces, the New York–based artist and scholar—whose work focuses on transforming architecture through unexpected, often beautiful activations—found herself drawn closer not to the divine, but to the floor.
Decorated in a style called cosmatesque, the flooring features complex marble-and-stone motifs that act as a kind of pathway during religious processions. Fascinated by how the marble’s natural mottled hues complicated the already intricate designs, Roberts decided to use the medieval motifs as a framework for patterns of her own, which she created in Photoshop using images of marble slabs. She made a number of these digital collages, and aptly named the body of work “Marbles.”
