Continuing with our exciting interviews, this week we have the pleasure to speak to Siân Martin.
Siân Martin.
As a visual artist was it a challenge to write about your practice ?
This was such a challenging topic, to write about how I develop a project. I’ve always thought my stages of making were in a neat linear, logical progression. I smile as I now acknowledge that it is more of a criss-cross jumble of a network of connections that occasionally make glorious and unexpected connections. I suppose this is the joy I find in the creative making process.
During this project have you looked at a new way of working ?
My project for ‘Insights’ is a new one for me, although I’ve always enjoyed doing textile-like processes with non textile materials. In this instance I was keen to use discarded plastics to make textile pieces that hint at and question the polluting effect of plastics dumped in the sea and along our coastlines. This is a huge topic, so I started by limiting the focus, initially looking at redundant plastic drinks bottles.
A bottle shape is one that connects benignly as a carrier of water, but also one that has come to symbolise the curse of plastic pollution. Initially, I found plastic an unfriendly material – uncompliant and hard – not the usual qualities of handling textiles, which appeal to feelings of warmth and softness. I associate the plastic bottle with ugliness due to a dislike of the damage that discarded plastics are doing to our planet. I discovered other qualities as I worked with this material.
