Martha Skinner

Lives and works in Marshall, NC, USA

Artist statement

My installations and participatory documents come to life through collective participation. My work, which I prefer to refer to as “my play”, is created through connection and exchange. As spaces, performances, experiments and community projects, in playful ways they address, highlight, subvert, societal and environmental issues that need transforming. The process by which they emerge is a celebration of life. While guiding young people to develop visions of their own during my teaching career, I developed drawings in two, three and four dimensions, slivers of life and cross sections across time, through culture and the physical spaces that contain life through an array of representation methods combined and rethought through the lens of architectural conventions and moving image. My work is as much a reinterpretation of drawing as much as it is an examination of humanity. My recent work and with the onset of the pandemic, has transformed into what I can accomplish on my own and with what's at my disposal. I am playing in those in-between spaces of everyday life and collaborating with light, water, steam, shadows and the occasional passerby. I have made Inhabitable Drawings in my shower and on the asphalt below my apartment utilizing video and photography. I am also working on a series of handheld pieces that are created through the interplay between “reflections” and shadows captured in my photographs and drawings [which I construct with delicate strips of tape, string...

Artwork