Marks’s work centers on an abstract entity named Volitia (a character that has “volition”— the  power of self-determination). Despite being an abstraction, Volitia is self-aware and invested with humanism, as well as agency. In many ways, she is an alter ego that Marks has willed into being. The series follows Volitia’s various adventures that unfold through a series of imagined scenarios and escapades, following the visual movement of a narrative, much like a comic book without words.

Throughout her practice, Marks pushes back on the separation of abstraction and figuration. She refuses the idea that they exist or operate in opposition to one another, both countering and assimilating aspects of each, and working in the gap between the two.

While appropriating aspects of the gesture and scale of Abstract Expressionism with her large-scale wall paintings comprised of huge black gestures on white surfaces, Marks counters the mythology of the heroic abstract painter by embracing the decidedly anti-heroic medium of colored pencil and pairing the two together. Marks also references conventions of early Renaissance fresco cycles, contemporary comics, aspects of Pop Art, and the rigor and temporal nature of the wall paintings of Sol Lewitt, in her creation of a unique narrative form of a personified abstraction.