Lines

Shantell Martin’s work has, for more than a decade, entranced audiences around the world – from the USA to Japan – in its intuitive energy, skill and bravura. With her highly personalised language of characters, faces, creatures and messages, Martin invites viewers to actively engage in the creative process. Using drawing as a physical stream-of-consciousness, her work is characterised by a unique freedom, expressed through the possibilities of her chosen ‘canvas’ – whether a piece of paper or textile, a sculptural surface, wall or screen.

Her recurring motif, ‘WHO ARE YOU’, appears time and again in her work, vocalising her vision to interrogate “who we are at the core, as people”. Bridging the fine art and commercial worlds, she has – since her beginnings with live performance drawing in the mega clubs of Tokyo – navigated creative worlds to interrogate and play with the role of artist and viewer.