Marilyn Darrell is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon whose practice spans large-scale painting, serial works on paper, hand-cut photographic prints, and song. Across these forms, she works through layering, erasure, repetition, and the physical and emotional charge of place.

Born in Louisiana and raised on the prairies of Nebraska and among the redwoods of Northern California, she later spent many years in Austin and South Texas. Those geographies and the distances between them continue to inform work concerned with movement, belonging, loss, and the unstable ways people construct stories about where they come from.

She holds an MFA in Visual Studies. Her visual practice moves between altered documentary photographs and abstract paintings made with oil, gouache, graphite, tracing paper, and materials gathered from particular places. Through erasure, accumulation, improvisation, and shifts between image and abstraction, she creates work in which what is missing can carry as much weight as what remains.

Her songwriting draws inspiration from honky-tonk, country music, Texas songwriters and authors, and rock and roll. She sings and plays guitar and diatonic accordion, leads Mare and the Colts, and also performs with A Town Called Home. Her visual art and music are distinct practices, but both return to place, memory, distance, longing, and the pull of home.

Across media, she creates work that is emotionally direct without being easily resolved–work that makes room for tenderness, contradiction, humor, loss, and the difficult beauty of ordinary life.