About Ghost Stories and my current work
Lately I’ve 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 – or were they just an illusion? They can vanish before your eyes can focus on what you see.
Making art is a conjuring process – or rather, it’s ghost whispering or something like that. In the studio, I stand between two paintings I’ve made. The one behind me is on canvas and it’s pinned to the wall. The one I’m holding up in front of me is on translucent gauze. Across the room, there’s a camera on a tripod and it’s set to take pictures at a slow shutter speed. As I move, the lines blur and the shapes they make change. My body disappears to make way for something else.
About my work in general
All my work centers around painting as performance, as an act that brings with it the artist’s whole body.
My photographs involve a performance for the camera. I paint directly on my skin, and then photograph myself and print the image on cotton rag paper. In the final images, my body isn’t exactly visible. It’s there, but not there, as the painting takes over.
My canvases also begin with a performative process. I dip my torso into liquid paint and then rub it down the side of the canvas. It’s a simple movement that I repeat across the surface. I’m looking for a sense of rhythm in the marks.
In Chinese painting, it’s not so much the marks you look at, as the way the energy moves around those marks. That space is empty, empty but full. If I think of my marks as traces of myself, then maybe what I’m doing is emptying out. I'm looking for what happens in the flow around me – and seeing painting as a dynamic, a form of energy, a movement score.
“Painter, printmaker, photographer, and filmmaker, Katy Martin’s work moves between mediums with a grace and ease that few artists are able to command. Her work has long centered on the body and choreography, a fascination that one can trace back to her earliest Super 8 movies. Almost all of her films and videos are rooted in tracing an action, whether it be artisans pulling the prints for an edition by Jasper Johns, the movement of a dancer, or the painted skin of the artist herself. Subtle yet distinctive, her films have an elegance and intuitive internal rhythm that will stick with you long after the screening has ended.”
— Andrew Lampert, Anthology Film Archives, 2015 program notes