UW-Madison Art Dept. | Fall 2021 Visiting Artist Colloquium: Michelle Martin

As a printmaker, Michelle Martin is interested in the depiction of social interactions and societal commentary through experimental, non-linear narratives created by using pre-existing source imagery in a collage/drawing/printmaking hybrid process. While Martin admires the traditional applications, her work focuses on pushing the traditional boundaries of collage, combining it with digital drawing and hand printing techniques to create images that appear to be “unbroken.” She draw from sources from Old Masters and Victorian era popular imagery to clip art. This process is a form of “image sustainability,” a recycling of past imagery into new forms. Both monumental and intimate in scale, the historic images Martin re-purposes encourage a nostalgia for fairy tales and whimsical stories, and also generate disquieting and open-ended narratives that serve as a form of “stealth” political and social commentary. Exploring themes of monstrosity and hybridity, her work investigates the modern experiences of identity, fear and desire filtered through a historical lens.
michellemartinprintmaker.com