Shantell Martin: NEW/NOW at NBMAA
Who knew that drawing a line could create something so striking? Shantell Martin knew. I’d seen her work online before but hadn’t been able to experience it in the flesh until her first career retrospective was installed at the New Britain Museum American Art.
As impressive as her smaller pieces are, seeing her instantly recognisable lines covering an entire gallery wall in a huge mural was something rather special.
Martin created that 40x16 foot, site specific mural titled ‘Transparency’ over the course of several hours in a spontaneous and stream-of-conscious flow, the imagery was not pre-planned but unfolded over the wall and canvases in real time. You can watch a video of Martin creating the mural below.
“With all my drawings, they typically start with an initial line, almost like a skeleton. I call this line the DNA of the drawing. Once you have the DNA in place, it becomes about the negative space, the pockets that are left. These spaces give me clues about what goes in them. The clues are the forms of the different types of lines in various positions on the surface, and the things that go in them are a mixture of faces, landscapes, words, stick figures and recurring characters.”
Martin remembers watching her mother draw and thinks that is where her inspiration came from. She is now continuing the family connection by collaborating with her grandmother Dot to create nearly 100 needlepoints. As well as being beautiful to look at, these pieces have given Martin the opportunity to discuss the issue of race with Dot.
“What was really great was that this was my white grandmother, in her eighties, from a completely different generation and race. We could have these conversations about race through the pieces we were making. One pair said ‘British’ and ‘English’ and once they were completed, we had a conversation about what it means to be English. I asked her, ‘Do you realise that I don’t call myself English because I’m brown? Being English is many ways is reserved for white people.’ She didn’t realise that.”
I personally feel a deep connection to Martin’s work, I don’t know if it’s because she grew up in Thamesmead, an area in London that I visited a lot as a child (one of my best friends live there), or because we are almost exactly the same age, or because her deceptively simple black lines spark my imagination and inspire my own art, nonetheless I spent a lot of time in that gallery poring over her work, wanting to soak in every single detail.
You today are you
ink on canvas, 2016
Martin graduated with a first-class honours degree from Central Saint Martins, an internationally renowned art school in London, before moving to Japan to teach English and work as a VJ in Tokyo. A VJ or video jockey (I had to google it to check what it was) creates art in conjunction with music that is projected out across a venue - sometimes to thousands of people - live on screen. Martin believes that VJing changed the course of her art career:
“It put me in a position where I just drew and I didn’t have time to overthink it, to plan, to hesitate, to be anyone else other than me, in that moment. When you’re drawing live and you have an audience watching you, you just have to do it.”
When Martin relocated to New York in 2008 her mantra became “draw on everything” and she began incorporating everyday items in her art. She covered bottles, toys and personal memorabilia in white gesso and then transformed them into individual works of art by adding her signature drawings.
In the NBMAA exhibit these have been brought together, forming an impressive installation that made me want to get in close and have a good look. These distinctive smaller items have been paired alongside a couch, love seat and ottoman, which Martin designed in collaboration with French company Ligne Roset in 2019, using textiles she made with Momentum Textiles in 2017.
Also in the exhibit is a sampling of the impressive collaborations that Martin has worked on over recent years including The New York City Ballet, MIT, Max Mara, Puma, Martone Cycling Co, and interior designer Kelly Wearstler.
“I’ve been drawing on clothes since I was a kid. It’s actually something that I used to get into trouble for and now, as an adult, I get to do it as much as I like!”
On the Road: The Future YOU
Theo Coulombe X Shantell Martin, 2017
pigment print with ink on watercolour paper with drawn ink
I’m extremely excited to see where Martin goes next, both in terms of her career and indeed physically; I’m hoping for another installment of the #shantellontheroad project which documented her 2017 road trip from Los Angeles, California to Jersey City, New Jersey, where she used the roads she travelling along as a giant natural canvas.
Shantell Martin: NEW/NOW is on display at the New Britain Museum of American Art until 18th April 2021.