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Gillian Martin | Episode 1136
Gillian Martin is a Melbourne-based artist working primarily in ceramics. Gillian holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Ceramics) from Monash University and has a background in photography, a practice that continues to inform her attention to composition and surface detail. Since returning to clay. Gillian has focused on material exploration, working across a variety of clay bodies to investigate new approaches to form, color, and texture. Color and stripes plays a central role in Gillian’s process. Through layered applications of contrasting tones and slips, Gillian creates dynamic, evolving surfaces to explore concepts of perception, optical illusions, and the nature of lines. This intuitive, unstructured approach allows each piece to develop its own visual language, shaped by instinct, emotion, and material response.
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How do you think your life experience and that break influenced your creativity?
I think the photography and just the tonal range of things. Add color to the pots in a tonal range. And just from taking photos, the environment, shadows, light, the depth.
How do you feel that your maturity and your station in life, having had kids influenced the way that you would make or the pieces you would make?
I don’t know how that has influenced my work. I think when you have kids you are very busy focused on them and their development and their happiness and then once they get to a stage in their lives you become a bit freer and you have more time. And then I think you sort of start to develop being yourself again and then my work, I think has evolved from having my own time and my own space.
If you were in an elevator and someone were to say, What does your work look like? They had never seen it. How would you explain it?
It’s colorful. It’s tonal. It’s undulating curves. And a touch of the environment. And abstract.
What feelings do you feel that it evokes? What feelings would you like them to evoke?
I think color. Relationship of color and what people perceive colors to be. And how people can work with color I think my work is very bright and very out there. It’s something that people either like or see and like but don’t think they would like it if they didn’t see it if that makes sense. It’s just vibrant and natural.
Why do you use terra sig and not an underglaze?
I think terra sig gives my pots a better feel because I don’t glaze over the top of them. I like the way terra sig is very fluid and it just holds on the brush when you are painting. I also like how you can polish it and give it that shine.
Do you think creativity is born or learned?
I think it’s in people. I think it’s something that you can learn the techniques but the development of creativity is something that comes natural to people.
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Instagram: @gmartin.ceramics