I will be teaching a workshop about my current enthusiasm: telling stories through the medium of paper-based puppets. This workshop will be held in-person in the large, airy, free parking, easy-to-access ArtWorks great room in Edmonds on Saturday, March 11th from 10am to 4pm. Come and explore the relationship between form and content with me in person. Space is limited for this workshop, registration is required, and laughter will ensue. More details here: https://mailchi.mp/c956c2902134/emily-martin-workshop-march-11th-8115539
I have been awarded a one month Jan and Frank Cicero artist-in-Residence fellowship at the Newberry Library, Chicago for spring 2023. The fellowship will support my work and research for an upcoming artist’s book with the working title of “Navigational Tools for the Willfully Lost”. I will concentrate my studies on the 16th century navigational and cosmographical texts of the Edward E. Ayer collection. The Ayer collection contains a large number of texts with paper tools such as the Apian Cosmographia 1584 and many more. My project will likely include a combination of paper volvelles, pop-up maps, and prediction/explanation devices relevant to our current time of plague, one not only medical but political, ecological and more, and completion is expected by late 2023, early 2024.
I will be teaching a paper puppets workshop at the San Francisco Center for Book Arts, March 4-5, 2023. For more information and to register go to the link below.
A short video using lines and additional dialogue for the characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a focus on Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ47SNC1-ZQ
Madness was created during the pandemic and went through many forms before it became what you see here. It’s appearance and content are very much shaped by my time in isolation. Initially, I copied out the play Hamlet by hand starting in March 2020 because I was too anxious to sit and read. I also was making paper puppets for companionship. The project kept changing as events swirled around me. I struggled to make sense of the project in a world gone crazy. The text is a crazy quilt arrangement of lines from Hamlet and my writing on repeating themes of fear, disease, Black Lives Matter, Asian hate crimes, the insurrection, so much death and isolation. Madness was printed letterpress with polymer plates from Boxcar Press on Arches Text wove paper. The background pattern is made up of my renderings of tears, drops of blood, Covid-19 particles and bullet holes. The paper puppet inclusions were printed on University of Iowa Center for the Book Chancery paper and are costumed in papers of wheat straw, sisal, daylily fibers, and abaca paste papers made by Andrea Peterson. The non-adhesive covers are flax and abaca papers made by Mary Hark for the outside and flax papers from the University of Iowa Center for the Book for the inside. Encased in a cloth covered clamshell box. The book was printed in an edition of 25 copies with a few strays. Madness was funded in part by a grant from the College Book Art Association and I thank them.
My book Oscar Wilde: In Earnest and Out, has been selected as a finalist for the Meggendorfer Artists Book Prize, awarded by the Movable Book Society. The winner will be announced at the MBS Conference in Denver, CO, on October 2, 2021. For more information on my book, click on the Books link above.
My book Gertrude Has a Few Questions, is in an exhibit organized by 23 Sandy/form & concept at the form & concept gallery in Santa Fe, NM, August 11 – November 20, 2021. For more information about my book, click the Books link above.
My book Oscar Wilde: In Earnest and Out is in an exhibit organized by the Abecedarian Gallery at the Arts Students League in Denver, CO, September 29 – November 7, 2021. For more information on my book, click the Books link above.
My book Oscar Wilde: In Earnest and Out is on exhibit at the Rochester Public Library, Rochester, NY, July 9 – October 31, 2021. For more information on my book, click the Books link above.
Three of my books, The Tragedy of King Lear, Oscar Wilde: In Earnest and Out, and Gertrude Has a Few Questions are on exhibit at the Decatur Arts Alliance exhibit on Decatur, GA, August 13 – October 1, 2021. For more information on the individual books, click the Books link above.
