Sue Martin

Over the past year, my studio transformed and became what I like to refer to as my ‘magic garden’. An environment of fantasy and wonder where I found myself spending hours exploring and playing. I found beauty in my artworks and the various materials that surrounded me.

Like a garden I need light, and I allow this light to shine out of my work. Love is light.

This body of work is a celebration of life and its fragility.

This show comprises a body of new paintings, monoprints and etchings. The series of monoprints began evolving last year as a response to the death of my Mother. Her passion was her garden. Unlike the wild indigenous garden that I have surrounding my home, my mother’s garden was an English country-style garden, comprising of many exotic plants carefully pruned into compliance. She spent hours maintaining her garden, she planted in ‘beds’, along boundary walls and around the house: neat, orderly and clipped back.

My images of peonies, poppies and dahlias are a nostalgic reference to these past memories. Juxtaposed with images from my own indigenous garden, which is wild, unruly and left to self-seed and regenerate, as the seasons come and go. The Iris, referenced in my “Lie of the Land” series, represents a colonial, bygone era, blooming only for a short period of time. Its exotic, foreign beauty strangely out of place in the harsh highveld landscape.

In the “Cartographer’s Notes” series, I have worked onto the surface of found maps, which take on a more botanical theme. Plants and places that I have seen and visited, have re emerged onto the surface, in a bright and spontaneous way. The limited edition of etchings, with their sketch-like quality, denotes a field study, capturing the essence of a plant seen in nature, to be taken home and reworked in the studio.

“But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.” - Anselm Kiefer

All the prints were done in collaboration with printer Bevan de Wet at Eleven Editions.