Katy Martin is a visual artist whose work combines painting, photography and performance. She also makes film and video. Her art, paint on skin, is about the fluidity of borders and skin itself as a porous boundary that continually shifts and changes.
She works across disciplines to explore the physicality of gesture, as she paints on — or with — her body and skin. What she’s after is elusive, a presence and absence, as concepts like “self” and “expression” disappear.
Lately she’s been thinking a lot about ghosts and painting on silk gauze as a kind of second skin. Ghosts, like painting, have a long and storied history of avoiding normal pathways and emerging through walls. Also like painting, they reveal themselves differently, depending on the moment and how open you are. Then, too, they can vanish before your eyes, before you can focus or hold on to on what you see.