Australian artist Mandy Martin died in July at the age of 68 after a long battle with cancer. Described as a highly influential artist, educator and a passionate environmentalist, her art often explored the fraught relationship between humans and the environment. She graduated from the South Australian School of Art in 1975, where she also taught. Martin produced such a rich and varied oeuvre that I can only skin over the surface here.
From early on in her career she produced politically engaged work such as a screenprint referencing the Vietnam War which appeared in the New York feminist magazine Heresies in 1977.
Screen print for Heresies Magazine, 1977
For many years her work focussed on the impact of mining on the landscape of New South Wales and for 20 years she kept returning to the Cadia open cut mine to commence a new body of work. A project would commence with a trip with her sketchbook placed on an ironing board, using pigments she found in the area as well as inks.
“My work has always been about the interplay between the natural environment and the industrial, you can’t talk about the degradation of the environment without talking about what you want to preserve in that environment”. Some of her work presents a simple vision of the natural world contrasting with the impact of the industrial. “It’s a juxtaposition between the two.”
Mandy Martin with her work Four Riders from 2016
Martin’s father was a professor of botany at the University of Adelaide and her mother an artist and she would often go on field trips with them, with her father collecting specimens whilst her mother painted. Thus she thought it natural to see the interrelationships between science and art. Her work has been credited with bringing an intellectual perspective to the issues of environmental degradation – not to scare people but to make them think.
She rarely used tube paints, instead preparing her own pigments which were often supplied by farmers, archaeologists and friends. “I do some loose impasto work to begin with, then I lie it down and stain it and flood on more pigment and that kind of half destroys the work. It sounds weird but lots of wonderful things happen, it runs and blurs and once it dries I work back into those ‘mistakes’ as it were.” Martin didn’t like the ‘hand of the artist’ being evident in her work or the mannered brush mark. Instead, she wanted blocks of colour and scrape marks.
Homeground 3, Ochre, pigment & oil on linen 2004, 1.5 m x 3 m
She felt that she was still painting the same picture, that her techniques and subject matter hadn’t really changed since the 1980’s. “I’ve always been interested in texture and surface and because I do a lot of landscape based work, it’s natural to want to incorporate the materiality of the land.”
The aboriginal scar trees dotted across the central west of NSW (including on her property near Mandurama) were an influence on her work, and she worked collaboratively with a native elder Trisha Carroll in works such as Haunted. Martin found that Trisha brought a spiritual dimension to her work which she found fascinating.
Haunted 1, ochre, pigment, oil on linen 2004, 1.5 m x 5 m
She had also been keen to push the boundaries of her work, which included a collaborative multimedia effort with her son Alexander Boynes titled ‘Homeground’, a combination of her painting and his digital work. I saw one of their collaborations at Latrobe Regional Gallery in 2019 – it was quite an eye-opener.
In relation to the huge scarring of the landscape caused by open cut mining, Martin says “They talk about offsets but how do you offset something like that? You can’t, once it’s gone it’s gone”
“I used to do a lot of detailed drawing, but I’m getting much older and arthritic so I’m being a lot broader and looser now. I love painting because I’m totally seduced by the materials and textures and working on a good piece of linen with my favourite ochres and pigments makes me pretty happy.” Following her death, the Canberra Times described Martin as deeply ethical and beautifully human. “Her art engaged society, spoke of its challenges and addressed the existential threats that it faced.”
Red Ochre Cove, oil, 1987, 3 m x 12 m installed in the committee room, Parliament House Canberra
Martin held numerous exhibitions in Australia and overseas and her work can be found in many collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
An article posted by Australian Galleries tells us that in the final weeks of Mandy’s life, she requested that donations could be made to assist an annual artist grant, which her family would like to name in her honour. The details of this artist grant which will support creative responses to the climate crisis are currently being finalised. Donations can be made through the independent non-profit organisation CLIMARTE.
References;
Awarewomenartists.com
“The Beauty and the Terror” – Tom Griffiths (Inside Story)
Mandy Martin: Homeground Mini Doco – Bathurst Regional Art Gallery
Canberra Times