Jenny Martin

JENNY MARTIN is an award winning graduate of Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art.  She has recently been printmaking and this vibrant exhibition brings together a series of works drawn from images gathered on her travels.  Primarily based on trips to Pompeii and India, images from ancient civilisations hang alongside those of bustling market stalls, to form a body of work that aims to explore the different ways in which people leave signs of human activity. Faded frescoes of gardens and goddesses left on the walls of houses hidden for centuries contrast with the seemingly chaotic yet carefully ordered exuberance of Indian local markets. 

Traces of Life.

 The signs of human activity, the visual detritus of habitation or civilisation and the artefacts people gather to mark significant events or perform everyday tasks: these are the subjects of my prints.  Whilst people themselves rarely feature in my work, the fact that they were once or are still in a place, leaving a mark, a wall painting or an object is what interests me.  I want to create a sense of human presence and activity through these clues rather than necessarily depicting life itself.  

 In the pieces from Pompeii, it is the marks of a great civilisation of the past that I have recorded; crumbling wall paintings depicting goddesses and gardens, evoking a sense of the poetic nature of the rituals once performed by people in these places.  The work from India is of a completely different nature, although with the same essence.  Here it is the sheer abundance of life lived in the street that cannot be ignored, with markets trading in all kinds of items for everyday rituals: washing, dressing, cooking and eating.  Every surface seems to be decorated with splashes of colour, posters or wall paintings.

 The process of making the work has evolved in tandem with the evolution of the images.  In Pompeii, the ancient wall paintings, uncovered after centuries, are like documents recording all the stages of their existence; jewelled colours dimmed by time, cracked and distressed through being buried and brought back to life.  The prints themselves are built up of many layers, in a way echoing the gradual process of accumulation that has made the surfaces of the places depicted so rich and interesting.  The prints from India have been constructed differently, often with disparate fragments taken from my sketchbooks and photographs pieced together in a jumbled yet organised chaos, just like the places that inspired them.  Here it is the incredible contrast of dusty streets and buildings against the brightly coloured wares displayed on the stalls with painstaking attention to pattern and order, which demonstrates a joy in everyday objects.   The colours used are different too, with unexpected combinations; muted colours are set alongside hues that are almost fluorescent in their intensity.  Areas of subtle texture are juxtaposed alongside graphic elements, writing and images, sometimes quirky, sometimes lyrical. 

 In all of these images, there is a sense that someone has left their mark recently or in the distant past.  In making images of these leavings, I hope to celebrate the creativity and care that has gone into them.

If this page has opened without a navigation bar to the left, please click  Home