HENI Publishing launches Shantell Martin: Lines, the first monograph on the contemporary British artist Shantell Martin. Created in close collaboration with the artist herself, the beautifully designed coffee table book features her work across drawing, performance, music, technology and fashion. It also includes the first critical essay on Martin’s work by Katharine Stout, Director of Focal Point Gallery, and an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director at the Serpentine Galleries.
A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Shantell Martin’s work has, for more than a decade, entranced audiences around the world – from America to Japan – in its intuitive energy, skill and bravura. With her highly personalised language of characters, faces, lines 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.
One of her recurring motifs, ‘WHO ARE YOU’, appears time and again in her work, vocalising her vision to interrogate “who we are at the core, as people”. Earlier this year, she even took over the Times Square billboards to ask the question. 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.
This monograph charts – for the first time – the career of this prolific and popular artist, including early pieces such as ‘Dear Grandmother’ (a collaboration with Martin’s grandmother on over 70 pieces of embroidery), large-scale murals and commissions, and collaborations with museums, technical institutes such as MIT Media Lab, musicians and fashion brands such as Nike, Tiffany & Co, the New York City Ballet and Google Creative Lab.
Shantell Martin: Lines, £35 is available to purchase online from HENI.
