Jenine Marsh: new wishes.

14 Feb-31 May 2026

Overview

De La Warr Pavilion is delighted to announce new wishes., the first solo presentation in the UK by Canadian artist Jenine Marsh.

Jenine Marsh is an artist who uses sculpture and installation to explore themes of agency, mortality and value. Coins and other paraphernalia of exchange and contact are central to her practice, subjected to processes of destruction and transformation that cultivate illicit and intimate responses to the shared conditions of end-stage capitalism.

For new wishes., Marsh will transform the Ground floor gallery into a civic landscape centred on a large-scale fountain in a state of transition. The fountain will appear under construction, out of service or in decay, conceived in dialogue with the Pavilion’s modernist architecture and its role as a civic space. Coins and taxidermy pigeons will appear throughout the gallery and within the fountain itself. The pigeons act as quiet messengers of urban life, evoking movement, neglect, and the traces of human presence, while the coins gather as points of contact, carrying the weight of both hope and exchange. Together, these elements form a space that moves between stillness and change, linking the everyday act of wishing to the material conditions of life.

Marsh approaches this gesture as a ritual of belief, exchange and sacrifice, while exposing its contradictions within contemporary systems of value. Through acts of reconfiguration and transformation, she reimagines coin-wishing as a quiet expression of speculation—evoking a present suspended between what is wished for and what is left behind.

Fragments of urban detritus such as receipts, junk mail and newspapers will be embedded within the structure, echoing the accumulation of waste in our shared environments. Out of this debris, coins will emerge as focal elements, appearing squished, folded or pierced. The coins used in the exhibition are bronze counterfeits cast through a lost-wax process and electroplated to resemble circulated currency. As altered copies, they unsettle familiar ideas of worth and disrupt the ways coins perform economic value, suggesting that value itself is always performed. These transformations strip the coins of monetary function while allowing them to register human gestures and experiences, revealing what our material remains hold about us.