Learning to see: Monique Martin to give artist talk Saturday

Submitted photo. Artist Monique Martin will be in Prince Albert on Saturday, Jan. 25, to give an artist talk at the Mann Art Gallery. She will return in February to curate the 49th Annual Winter Festival Art Show and Sale.

Glenda Goertzen

Special to the Herald

Internationally renowned artist Monique Martin will be in Prince Albert on Saturday, Jan. 25, to give an artist talk at the Mann Art Gallery.

She will return in February to curate the 49th Annual Winter Festival Art Show and Sale. She looks forward to sharing her unique point of view with the artists who attend Saturday’s event.

“I’m hoping to encourage all the artists who come to just keep believing (in) the ideas they have and keep looking at those ideas from different angles and finding ways to touch the people that see your work,” she said, describing one of the themes of her upcoming talk.

“As I told children on Wednesday, I was working in a school, and they said ‘You’re going to teach us how to draw’ and I said ‘No, I’m going to teach you how to see.’ I’ve never taught anybody how to draw, but I’ve taught a lot of people how to see.

Martin, a multidisciplinary artist from Saskatoon with works on display around the world, is known for her innovative approaches to printmaking and installations. She just completed a piece that is 120 square meters of printmaking on canvas, meant to walk on. Previous installations have covered entire gallery floors. In contrast to most printmakers, she might “pull” the same screens hundreds of times make a field of daisies, for example.

Early in her career, with limited access to studio space and equipment, she pursued painting and clay works. Over time, she moved into printmaking, a medium she found more challenging.

“Printmaking is kind of like a do-or-die type process. You can’t go back and fix anything. You put a layer of ink on; it’s there. You can’t really go over top of it.”

In comparison to painting, the colours available to printmakers are very few, a limitation that Martin appreciates as it gives her the opportunity to create her own.

“I’m very into colour. I’m a bit of a colour nerd, and I love the mixing of colours, the coming up with something that wasn’t there before…. I use a lot of translucent layers and so I can play with the colour that’s underneath.”

Before beginning a piece, Martin conducts intensive research into her subject, from the societal aspects of climate change to dispersal patterns of dandelion seeds.

“I’m researching one right now, and I’ve been researching for about six months, getting books, vintage documentation, all kinds of things that might not end up in the pieces, but it all affects how I see it and how I build it.

“When I did my dandelion series I made 3,000 paper dandelions life-size. Before I did that, I researched everything about a dandelion. I know more about dandelions than anyone should know. I didn’t use all that information in the pieces, but that information is there and I think it makes for a stronger… not interpretation, but an energy within the pieces.”

During the pandemic, Martin took her dandelions to most of the major cities in the provinces and displayed them in empty businesses that went bankrupt or had closed. She designed the layout of Context is Everything herself, putting her research into dandelion seed dispersal to good use.

When asked about other artists who might have inspired her, she responded that she is not as much inspired by other artists as she is inspired by the conversations she has with regular people.

“A lot of my work will come from reading a book and seeing a couple words in a book. It will come from talking with people just about their lives. A lot of my work is based on contemporary society, so I will grasp onto something somebody said, and most of my work is about a two-year research cycle before I actually do it.”

Encountering a single intriguing word might inspire an entire installation, as in the case of Martin’s series Paraph, which is about the loss of handwriting. 

“Paraph is, a long time ago, that flourish at the end of your signature. It was like a PIN code. Everybody knew yours in your town, everybody knew which was your paraph. And seeing that one word, I researched and researched and researched and then started looking for old letters, started looking for old stamps, and pretty soon I have a body of work.”

One of Martin’s most popular works is Annus Mirabilis, Latin for a remarkable or notable year–in this case, the year 2020. Annus Mirabilis is a series of works featuring many thousands of hand drawn butterflies, each having 15-35 silkscreened colours per side. Martin at first tried to cut them out on a manual cutter but felt the mechanical look of the edges deprived the butterflies of their energy.

“I cut them all up by hand, I had some friends help with the simple edges of the butterflies, but I cut out all the bums, all the antennas, for that feel that is human.”

When people see the works, she wants them to ask questions.

“I want people to wonder when they see my work, like, why would she make 24,000 butterflies? That’s insane. What’s she talking about?”

She loves receiving communications from people who have viewed her work.

“I’ll get pictures of nests. I’ll get pictures of all kinds of things. People will send me because they remember what they felt when they saw the work. Somebody just told me on the weekend in Humboldt, at the opening there that they went to, my opening of my dandelions,” she said, referring to her installation of Context is Everything, “and cried when they saw them, because they’re such a symbol of resilience and strength and perseverance, and they had recently lost a family member.”

In discussing the challenges of adjudicating the Winter Festival Art Show, Martin made comparisons to her experiences teaching art to young students.

“I’m quite good at being able to talk to people about their work without hurting their feelings, but adults are different because everyone, every piece of art that’s made, is a very personal thing, and a time commitment and an inner soul commitment, all of that. It’s hard to say one is better than the other. I mean, when I was teaching I kept saying, ‘Why do we have report cards for kids in art? We’re discouraging them if we have to mark this as good or bad, because all of it comes from the creative person inside.’

“There is no, she got it perfectly right. The person may have gotten it right for me in that instance, because I came to that point in my life with that amount of baggage, so that piece of art I connected with it, and I interpreted it in how they intended it. But somebody completely different would pick something else because of their baggage and their experiences and their understanding of the meaning within a work.

“I think for me what I look for in adjudicating, I’m hoping that they write some stuff about their work so that I don’t prejudge it and bring into it what I think is there that maybe isn’t there.” 

This year, Martin’s installations will travel to Kelowna, Korea, Greece, and Montreal. Currently she has approximately 4,000 of her butterflies and a floor cloth on display at the Humboldt and District Gallery until Feb. 22.

Summarizing the intent of her upcoming artist talk, Martin said, “I want to encourage them to really think too about deep ideas. What are you trying to say, and is there an overall cohesiveness to all your bodies of work? I know that mine are linked with the commonality of time. A lot of my work deals with time, almost all of it, so I want them to try through my talk to go, ‘What is my common theme, and how can I make that stronger?’”

Monique Martin’s artist talk is in partnership with the P.A. Arts Board. The event will take place at the Mann Art Gallery, 142 12th Street West, on Saturday January 25th, 7:00-8:30 PM. More information about her work can be found on her website, http://moniqueart.com/.

-Advertisement-