UNEARTHING BEAUTY FROM BROKENNESS:

List of Works by Marlon F. Hall

Across these works, brokenness is not the end of the story. It is the raw material from which beauty—and new belonging—emerges. Separate stories, geographies, and histories share a visual meditation with portals and alters that call us home.

For over two decades, Marlon F. Hall has transformed found objects, photography, and film into lived stories that reveal beauty within what the world often discards. In these sculptures, that practice turns inward. Each piece is composed of fragments and inspirations—doors, wood, hardware, and inherited home materials—gathered from Houston, Tulsa, Nairobi, Madison, Venice, and Hall’s ancestral home in Homer, Louisiana, built after emancipation.

Individually and collectively, these works function as both altar and portal: altars that witness memory, and portals that open toward personal and communal renewal. “The greatest gift I have received in a season of disorientation has been discovered in my meditative practice of found object sculpture making—a beauty uncovered in the midst of brokenness. These sculptures are less about building and more about listening to the materials as they tell me how they want to become architectural altars and spiritual portals of memory and imagination.” Each work extends an invitation: to see fracture as revelation, and the discarded as a luminous architecture of belonging.