We are melting 

2023–2025

Photographs, stained glass painting on glass, unique works

With this series, Marguerite Bornhauser continues her exploration of color as a sensory language to reflect on climate change. We Are Melting is a body of work that expresses the gradual disintegration of our world, the transformation of landscapes, ice, and ecosystems extending to our own experience of the environment.

Climate change is often represented through thermal maps and color charts, a chromatic vocabulary that has become the dominant way of depicting the crisis. Marguerite Bornhauser has chosen to approach it through color, the warm tones of rising temperatures, the icy blues of glacial erosion creating abstract images in which change finds vivid expression, not in a scientific way but in a living form.

Using the beginning and the end of a roll of film, We Are Melting underscores the play of temporalities: from the first moments of appearance to dissolution, to disintegration. Once printed on paper, these images are combined with glass plates hand-painted by the artist, turning each piece into a unique hybrid, a blend of photography, stained glass, and painting. With cascades of warm colors or glacial blue gradients, Bornhauser brings to the surface in her compositions the physical states of a world in peril, traces of decomposition, change, disintegration.

In this play of transparencies and overlapping layers, color becomes a form of emotional language. It highlights, rather than describes, what change leaves in its wake: remnants, debris, suspended moments. We Are Melting is a sculptural, sensual experience of the present crisis - not a simple documentary representation of facts, but a creative, intimate memory of what we are living through. Through this work, Marguerite Bornhauser asserts herself as a colorist of the image, using color not just to see the world, but to reveal what we tend to ignore a reality that the title underscores with force: we are melting.