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SASKATOONEXPRESS - February 16-22, 2015 - Page 1
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Volume 12, Issue 7, Week of February 16, 2015
Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
Local artist attracts international attention Shannon Boklaschuk Saskatoon Express reating diverse pieces of art. Exhibiting the work at home and internationally. Addressing social issues. Inspiring children to become artists themselves. It’s all in a day’s work for Monique Martin, a local teacher and multi-disciplinary artist. To say Martin is busy these days is an understatement. In addition to her job at Georges Vanier Catholic fine arts school, she is currently showing her work as part of several exhibitions in Saskatchewan, New York and South Korea. “It’s pretty exciting,” she said of the multiple shows. “But at the same time, as I told my husband, if I never had another exhibition ever in my whole life I’ve had enough, so it’s all good. And I would continue to create, because I just love the creation part. “The exhibitions are just a bonus for me. I love sharing my work, so it’s a way to share it, but I’m not the kind of artist that is out there trying to sell stuff.” Over the years, Martin has had about 50 solo exhibitions and 20 group exhibitions at home and internationally, including in Australia, Italy, Hungary, France, England, Korea, the U.S. and throughout Canada. She is not an artist that confines herself to one medium; instead, she works as a printmaker, a sculptor and a painter. “I try to exhaust my idea to the point that I think I can’t say any more about what I’m trying to say, and sometimes that takes more than one medium,” she said. “I sometimes can’t say what I want to say with one medium, so hence the hexagons in the trees.” The hexagons Martin refers to are the thousands of clay pieces that have been placed in trees along the Saskatoon riverbank, from the Meewasin Valley Centre to the Mendel Art Gallery. The installation in the trees, which is part of the City of Saskatoon’s Placemaker Program, is just one of several current displays of Martin’s work. “It’s all about how the links are interconnected and if one link breaks, then other links are affected. It’s all about how we affect each other in the world and we affect the environment,” Martin said, adding, “I like to have dialogue around my pieces and I think that’s what I am creating.
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Monique Martin’s art is now showing in New York and South Korea (Photo by Trint Thomas) “Especially with the hexagons on the riverbank — I mean, people for sure are dialoguing about ‘Why are they there? What’s happening?’ And I think that’s important.” Martin had 918 people — mostly children — involved in making the clay hexagons with her, for a total of 11,043 hexagons. About one-third of them are covered in beeswax, which Martin’s
students helped her tackle one Saturday at Georges Vanier. Eighty-six trees along the riverbank are adorned with the clay pieces. “I think it’s powerful for people to make art,” she said. “Art — a visual and a tactile thing — makes people think about the world a little more.” The hexagons in the trees can also be seen in a display case at the Mendel Art
Gallery, as part of a new exhibition entitled The Absolute Way of Things. The exhibition features Martin’s large-scale prints and focuses on bees as the subject matter. The hexagons in the trees are reminiscent of the hexagons depicted in Martin’s bee prints in the Mendel show, which also includes work by Martin’s mentor, Cathryn Miller. (Continued on page 4)