New Worlds Other Worlds
Lyrical yet unknowable, Lucille Martin’s new series of landscape photocollages brings viewers into a well-timed and powerful encounter with the mystery of the natural world. The delights of arcadia are writ large over sumptuous aluminium, paper and cloth surfaces, materials intended to celebrate and honour.
The photographic fragments that comprise each work are the result of Martin’s omnivorous documentary approach, collected over 18 months of residencies across Australia and New Zealand, from Cradle Mountain to the geysers of Rotorua. In the studio, Martin digitally (or with paper-and-scalpel) stitches together the wild architecture of natural portals like caves, tree hollows, craters and tangled mangroves to form mega/meta-landscapes. These fused ecologies beckon viewers through busy surface terrain into shadowy, unknown states beyond. Each work proposes a different Pangea, merging coastal, subterranean, wooded and botanical realms. We pass through portals of solid rock into underlands, subworlds and neathscapes, which offer sanctuary, both for us and from us.
Martin’s worlds are knotted tight around the paradox of shelter and threat. Nature is the font of human spiritual and quotidian renewal, and yet it suffers depletion at our touch and wounds us indiscriminately. Accordingly, Martin performs a disembodied practice of walking and iPhone photography to source her imagery; treading softly and genuflecting to the continuity of a long-continuous nature.
Withdrawn to our homes during lockdown, Martin’s panoramas have taken on a monstrous vigour, as we remember and restore our instincts for the ancientness, strangeness and changeable states of the natural world. “These worlds are a conduit between us and the feelings and conversations happening in our communities currently,” says Martin.
Lucille Martin would like to acknowledge funding and support from the Department of Culture & the Arts WA, Fremantle Art Centre, Vancouver Art Centre, Bundanon Trust, UTAS-School of Creative Arts and Wilderness Gallery-Cradle Mountain National Park
Sheridan Hart
This series was awarded and will appear in the forthcoming feminist-surrealist exhibition Imaginary Territories, curated by Kelsey Ashe (PS Art Space, Fremantle, 16 October – 14 November 2020).
