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Visual artist Shantell Martin said every child draws. But for her, as a child, drawing was her outlet.
“It’s how I got all the angry stuff, the unknown stuff, the stuff I didn’t know where to put,” she said. “I could draw it, I could write it, I could pull it on paper.”
Martin offers a selection of her drawings in her newly opened exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture in Mercer County, titled “Shantell Martin: Past, Present, Future.” They are from a two-year daily drawing practice she maintained and are displayed in a feature she calls Replay Cards.
Martin said the daily activity was not simply about drawing.
“It’s about capturing drawings at a fidelity that is lossless,” Martin said, adding that she did the drawings on a mobile app she developed with designer Amit Pitaru.
“It’s wanting to capture something that has a fidelity that it can always be recreated,” she said. “When you can replay these drawings and now you know the stroke order, you know what was happening around me. Sometimes I’m talking to you as I’m drawing. So, it’s like a diary.”
The exhibit, as described by the museum, invites people to contemplate the multifaceted nature of time and our ever-evolving relationship with it. The exhibit features Martin’s signature line drawings, which includes personal symbols and wordplay.
