Working across sculpture and installation, Canadian artist Jenine Marsh explores materials tied to exchange and circulation. Coins recur throughout her practice, undergoing processes of change that question how value is established and experienced in everyday life.
new wishes. is Marsh’s first solo institutional presentation in the UK and centres on a large-scale fountain built within the gallery space. The structure appears in a state of transition and may read as under construction, out of service, or in decline. Developed in dialogue with the Pavilion’s modernist architecture and its role as a civic space, the fountain draws on the familiar form of the wishing well, where private hopes are expressed through a small public act. Here, wishing helps us to see how hopes for a better world persist despite the current conditions of capitalism in the early 21st Century.
The coins used in the exhibition are bronze counterfeits, cast using a lost-wax process and electroplated to resemble circulated currency. Altered through squashing, folding, or piercing, they no longer function as money in a conventional sense. Instead, they bear traces of handling and use, highlighting how value is assigned and enacted — and what remains once money no longer functions as currency.
Taxidermy pigeons are positioned within the installation, around the fountain and across the gallery. Familiar figures in urban environments, they act as quiet messengers, recalling their long presence in human society while pointing to histories of labour, neglect, and survival shaped by capitalist development of the world around us. Dependent on human waste and transient spaces, the pigeons mirror lives sustained through what is left behind. Alongside them, fragments of urban debris such as receipts, junk mail, and newspapers are embedded within the structure and scattered across the gallery floor, situating the work within the traces of daily exchange.
Marsh’s coins appear within the fountain itself, accumulating slowly and unevenly. Acting as points of contact, they carry associations of both hope and exchange. Together, the fountain and coins create a space that moves between stillness and activity, linking the simple act of making a wish to broader material conditions of life and how value circulates.
All works are courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto.
