Exhibition - Kenneth Martin and Mary Martin: Constructed Works
- Published: 11 October 2007 15:41
- Last Updated: 11 October 2007 15:41
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Maquette by Mary Martin for her work at Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast
EXHIBITION
By Andrew Mead
Kenneth Martin and Mary Martin: Constructed Works.
At Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Road, London NW3, until 16 September
At the entrance to the first-floor galleries at Camden Arts Centre (CAC), remodelled by Tony Fretton in 2004, is a maquette by Mary Martin. It’s for an ‘environment’ in the ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1956 – a show featuring several artist/architect collaborations (Alison and Peter Smithson with sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, for instance) that is now most remembered for launching Pop Art in the UK.
But the exhibit that Martin created with her husband Kenneth and architect John Weeks was more austere and abstract. The Martins belonged to a group of artists who called themselves Constructionists; using everyday materials such as hardboard, stainless steel and perspex, their works sought to shape and activate space. Seen today in CAC’s deft installation, they still look fresh, engaging with architecture now as much as when they were made.
Mary Martin went on to realise a number of large-scale pieces for buildings, including Llewellyn Davies Weeks’ Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast, and RMJM’s Stirling University. They share the language of her smaller domestic works, in which honeycomb-like clusters of angled stainless-steel planes come alive with the light, or rhythmic groups of painted wooden blocks and planes form shallow orthogonal reliefs.
Reproduced in the excellent cheap catalogue, a 1957 model of Llewellyn Davies Weeks’ Corby Diagnostic Centre, with its multiple monopitch roofs, shows just how much architect and artist were in tune at that time. But it’s three of Mary Martin’s last works – constructions in clear and coloured perspex from 1969 – that seem most resonant now. In the precisely calculated way that the perspex planes slide past each other, meet, or seem to float, Martin’s sculptural shorthand at once evokes architecture.
From Kenneth Martin’s output, the CAC shows a mixture of mobiles and paintings – the mobiles mostly suspended in a line down the main room as a family of related forms. With asymmetrical spiralling arrangements of brass or steel strips, sometimes bent into arcs or circles, they’re especially effective in silhouette – the metal gleaming as they slowly rotate. A photograph in the catalogue shows several of these mobiles hung in a ward of London’s Whittington Hospital in 1953, where they were ‘valued for the mesmerising and soothing effect’ they had on patients – it’s easy to see why that was so.
Martin’s paintings are from a series he worked on over many years called Chance and Order: chance determining the points at which the paintings’ coloured bands or lines (their main constituents) begin and end. The results, though in no sense proposals for architecture, can nonetheless seem to anticipate some of today’s computer-generated designs.
This is art that’s in dialogue with architecture, with neither discipline usurping the other – maybe a more fruitful way for them to coexist than forced or funding-led collaboration?
