My paintings contain technology-based elements purloined from engineering diagrams, architectural floor plans, electrical blueprints, maritime charts and other types of informational drawing. These images get combined into sprawling hybrid constructs, frequently using formats derived from carpet designs, modernist painting, and religious diagrams such as Mandalas and Tantric drawings.
The materials I most often employ are intentionally at odds with the complex nature of my subject-matter. I prefer relatively ordinary, simple materials such as pencils, watercolor, paper, ink, which invoke the do-it-yourself mentality of the weekend inventor or crank. These allow the works to retain their reference to functional drawings, suggesting that somehow they are flattened versions
of some on-going, much larger, three-dimensional project. This aspect of the “plan” imbeds the work with a real sense of belonging in the future, and by extension, of altering a past, existing framework.
The titles are an integral part of the work, though perhaps not useful for any sort of linear explication. They come from listings of academic lectures, which I have been collecting alongside the archive of images that I cull elements from. The titles are selected on the basis of their seeming obscurity, authoritative tone, and evocative language. They function poetically with the imagery, adding a verbal disconnect that enriches the visual life of the work.
My practice plays with ideas of faith, belief, trust in science, and humanity’s enduring curiosity about the causal mechanisms which make up the world. They are about big plans, big plans to alter the existing world as we know it locally and globally, though my versions are absurd and impossible to enact. Broadly speaking, I am interested in ideas and their shelf-life, and the persistence of human hubris.
Selected Press Quotes:
“…Like Jules Verne in a Technicolor dream.”
New Haven, Open City
By Lisa Gates, Preview Connecticut Magazine
“Intimidating and intriguing, Lewis’ impenetrable titles are also representative of her proto-sci-fi prints and paintings. Tunneling Dynamics in a Chaotic Regime; Imprinting, Epigenetic Programming and Totipotency; Realm of Desire with Beings of Gross Form, obfuscating academic jargon appropriated from Oxford University lectures and papers rubric the tone of unsettling alienation. Taking blueprints of technical documents, floor plans, computer circuitry, engine parts, the U.S. born Oxford-based artist blends them into a semi-organic, wholly original corpus. This isn’t still life. It’s life in flux, anticipating a future where the technological and the visceral combine- an evolutionary mesh of flesh and circuitry explored by Auteurs like David Cronenberg.”
Martha’s Prints Charming
By Peter Kennedy, The Kilburn Times, London
“Martha Lewis paints roiling, brilliantly colored scenes of gorgeous disasters or spare images of mechanical meltdown on small scraps of paper scattered on the walls, as if the impact of all of this activity was too much to concentrate in one space.”
Distinguishing Marks
By Cathy Curtis, The Los Angeles Times
