On a quiet side street, just off the bustle of Brick Lane, in a quirky little bookshop called Libreria, a table is set for dinner. At first glance, there is nothing unusual about this supper club: candles flickering in the low light; a long linen-clothed table; lines of folding chairs. Yet look a bit closer and it might not seem quite as straight-laced at it seems. At each setting is a photo book of candid portraits from the 90’s, documenting young gay men in their homes. The books are complemented by plates painted with plump juicy peaches, and bowls drawn with cocks. The supper club is GAZE; a rare introspective insight into the non-normativity of queer homemaking. 

Hosted by curator Davy Pittoors, and artist Will Martin, GAZE is a celebration of photographer Marc Vallée’s book 90s Archive: Volume One which launched at The Photographer’s Gallery in 2022. What makes this photo series unusual is its intimate illumination of queerness as a domestic practice. Archival imagery of queer 90s London usually centres on clubs and bars, but rarely on the familiarity of home. Indeed, society has historically eschewed notions of queerness from the home, and queers have reciprocated by closing their doors on society’s unforgiving regard. GAZE explores this tension by opening its doors in an outward display of queer domesticity.

To gain a better understanding of their perceptions of domesticity, I speak to Davy and Will before the event. For Davy, domesticity is about curating spaces in which he feels safe, a practice which manifests itself in aestheticism. For Will, by contrast, the domestic is aspirational; something he might never achieve, and thus becomes about moulding spaces to better suit him. He uses the rental market as a relatable analogy to queer homemaking: in a space that isn't yours, you are a temporary feature; you don’t wholly belong yet you make it your own. 

This notion is echoed by the queer theorist Stephen Vider. In The Queerness of Home (2021) he suggests the domestic is mutable; defined by its inhabitants, yet nonetheless societally influenced. He likens domesticity to a script: “socially determined yet individually enacted; predetermined yet open to interpretation, improvisation, revision, and failure.” (ibid: 8). Queer domesticity is thus a subtle practice in alterity. Both Will and Davy agree that domesticity helps them create their space in the world, both introspectively and practically. For them, it is a quiet way to rebel the norm; a curatorial and culinary queering of convention.

It is apt, then, that a supper club is how Davy and Will choose to celebrate Marc’s book. Supper clubs negate the normativity of eating out through ‘social dining:’ a philosophy of using meals to connect socially. In contrast to restaurant dining which promotes exclusivity and individuality, supper club guests are seated next to strangers at communal tables, coming together to enjoy the same dishes. At GAZE, Will serves crostini piled high on communal boards; sharing bowls covered in dicks and filled with casarecce alla marinara and sausage ragù; thin slices of rich tarte au chocolat with macerated berries. Each of his dishes inspires informality, and is designed to encourage the communality of social dining.

Social dining is recognised by philosophers such as Jean Soler and William Robertson Smith to break social barriers, and engender companionship between strangers. Indeed, the very word ‘companion’—from the Latin com- ‘together with;’ and panis ‘bread’—is ‘one with whom you break bread.’ The democracy that arises from social dining has been celebrated throughout history. From the Ancient Classical tradition of shared feasting; to France’s post-Revolutionary communal dinners to celebrate their ‘fraternity:’ shared food makes for the most savoured meals.

The sharing of a meal with a stranger also elicits a social contract between host and guest. Both can expect mutual respect: the former in return for their hospitality; the latter through their invitation. From Will’s perspective, as a queer man, this is doubly important. Welcoming a stranger into your space takes implicit trust after a lifetime of social exclusion. This equality pervades every aspect of GAZE. In spite of this being a talk, Davy has gone to lengths to ensure that everyone is seated equally, and his discussion with Marc is open to evolve at any time into a wider conversation. As the evening plays out, it begins to feel like a raucous family dinner as everyone relaxes, and their stories flow forth. 

Most of us are familiar with the format of a traditional family dinner. Whether nightly or weekly, riotous or pious; these meals are synonymous with domestic life. The traditional family dinner has become a symbol of household stability, centring on parental pillars and often patriarchally inclined. Bread is broken across generations, and the experience of age can exchange wisdom with the awareness of youth. However, for many queers, mealtimes can be places of misunderstanding; whether benign or malign, and the wisdom we receive around is often misguided.

Through GAZE, Will and Davy reformulate the traditional family dinner by bringing together a ‘chosen family,’ and facilitate the perhaps lesser seen side of queer homemaking: an intergenerational queer meal. Queer youths often don’t have an experienced elder to turn to for wisdom. Indeed, many of our would-be elders fell victim to the AIDs epidemic. Those who did not succumb suffered its societal impacts and were swept aside, their wisdom deemed perverse. It is an unusual thing to lament that which one does not know. Yet, as an exclusively queer cast of my peers and elders sit around me in a familiar familial choreograph, I find myself feeling entirely at home.

Since he shot 90s Archive: Volume One, Marc’s work took a more photojournalistic route. Revisiting his archives has thus been cathartic for him, enabling him to introspect his own practice. During the talk, Marc is asked whether he will reshoot his models now. He responds that he has been trying to shoot a new generation of young queers in their homes, hoping to diversify his initial young white male cast. However, without the trust of friendship in his original shots, Marc has struggled to find willing subjects; a poignant reminder that even within the community, the queer domestic remains a safeguarded space.

GAZE’s queer domestic introspection will take on new levels as they set their sights on The Museum of the Home for one of their upcoming events. They will be working with the museum to inject more queer narratives, stories and perspectives throughout the exhibits. Here, Vider’s notion of the domestic reflects Davy and Will’s approach to the domestic as ultimately mutable. Through their supper clubs, Davy and Will invite everyone to take a seat at the table with their non-normative chosen family. Their events offer us a unique insight into what domesticity is to them, and might just inspire us to question our own perceptions of it, too.

Credits:
Writing: Barney Pau / @barneypau.com
Photography: : Davy Pittoors / @davypittoors
Table setting and design: Davy Pittoors / @davypittoors
GAZE Spotify Playlist by Owen Duff / @owenduffmusic
Naturally hand-dyed napkins by Eleni Avramidou / @ele.avra
Food & Tableware by Will Martin / @will.martin
Location: Libreria, a Bookshop by Second Home

(…) Martin works in a variety of media, including textiles and installations, but is perhaps best known for his series of ceramic chains. These chains clearly index modes of infrastructure as ligaments that connect as they also close-off and shackle. They are also in a sense trickster objects that are both fragile and indestructible. Martin mentions that they are an example of “the contradictory way I use my materials. And then there’s the BDSM component that chains inevitably invoke.” The fragility of ceramics also calls forth a time element. As Mathieu writes about queer ceramics in general, “In our world there has been a resurgence of funerary or ritualised objects in the wake of the AIDS crisis, which brought to the forefront once again the relationship between sex and death; Eros and Thanatos. These objects, like all other ceramic objects, will become, in the distant future, testament and witness to our time, when all other materials have been reabsorbed into oblivion. And if sexuality is necessary for the continuation of the organic world, then similarly ceramics’ capacity for preservation functions as the memory of humankind.” 

As material assemblages that underpin sociality, the ceramic chains – future unlinked links and shards of links – perform an infrastructural queer time of horizontality in which past, present, and future are copresent. These ceramics are delicate, always on the verge of snapping, and yet they also promise to remain with our waste for eons to come. The sexuality of the objects does not hover as decoration on the surface but is suffused into the way the chains are hailed in moments of durational performance. As in Midsommar, discussed below, Martin makes chains available to be worn by event and performance participant-observers, linking them to circuits of mutual enjoyment, calling into question the divisions of self and other that always suffuse the politics of spectatorship. In my conversations with Martin he indicated that, for him, pottery was “a way of ... sublimating my anxiety and my desires which at the time were unacceptable” in the conservative white South Africa of his youth. He continues to make pottery as a way of managing anxiety – but, crucially, “making pottery itself is also quite anxiety inducing if you become financially reliant on it, and that for me was a bit of a killer.” Precipitated by Britain’s long lockdown in response to the 2020 to 2021 COVID-19 pandemic, Martin shifted his pottery production from a “fine art” register – for instance, his series of large funerary urns adorned with phalluses and linked by chains – to the vessel tradition focused on bowls and other tableware for which he can find a much bigger market. For Martin, making the functional ware was a “more down-to-earth way of functioning. It’s less subject to the mania and depression of high stakes art, big shows, hoping someone will pick you up and look after you.” 

Regarding his current work, Martin’s approach to pottery as a vessel of his own intentional sublimation has shifted: “I’m trying to not sublimate at the moment, I’m trying to not dissociate. I’m trying to stay very present. With the wheel you have to be present. No chatting. If I’m not present and paying attention, this isn’t going to go well. You have to perform the movement or else it’s not going to work. So it’s the opposite of sublimating in a way.” For his current tableware work, he finds explicit use of representational stylistic elements to be unnecessary. Martin, working on the wheel, notes that clay gives the artist an immediate feedback loop, as the clay responds immediately. The wheel is less forgiving than other methods of making ceramics. As Martin says, “If you do something, it’s there for the rest of the object’s life. So it acts as almost a diagnostic tool for how I feel. It’s just you and this very receptive material. The material itself is very prone to projection. It’s also a great way of forming and communicating identity. People tell me who they are by how they treat the clay.” The objects themselves emerge as erotic infrastructure both through their circulation as craft commodities and through their enfolding into durational performance work that enacts an Orphic world. 

In summer 2021, shortly after the United Kingdom relaxed the limits restricting social gatherings imposed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing for outdoor meetings of up to thirty people, Martin, along with his two domestic partners, organized and performed an immersive event called Midsommar. The event, although inspired by the Swedish pagan tradition of celebrating the summer solstice, was heavily influenced by both classical mythology and the melancholic pastoral Englishness of films by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, such as A Room with a View. Martin made a large set of tableware specifically for the event, including large numbers of white, textured serving bowls made in crank. In the afternoon, Martin hosted a picnic party on his lawn with twenty-five invited guests. The second half of the event was styled as a sexy bacchanalian party organized around the fire pit at the bottom of the garden, which he had rewilded over the previous year. Guests were sent a mood board suggesting they come in cheesecloths or dress as Victorian gentlemen. Martin’s porcelain chains were also available in the living room along with a dress-up rail, so guests who did not bring a costume could choose something. 

Midsommar was a decidedly ambivalent work of art. Its air of self-regard and sense of seclusion from the urban hustle and bustle could be read as profoundly anti-urban, a hypercuratedness that ruled out moments of unexpected encounter with, much less hospitality toward, the stranger, ideals that, as Tim Dean forcefully argues, are at the very root of a queer ethics of alterity. For the guests, Midsommar was likely a high-camp party. But for Martin it was an enveloping but nondidactic durational performance for which he and his partners built the structure, which guests then fleshed out through their own enjoyment. The table was laid in the garden and covered in twill, broadcloth, and lace. Vases filled with flowers from the garden flanked some of Martin’s earlier urns. Home-cooked food was served in Martin’s bowls, and drinks were served in his porcelain cylinders. The event also functioned as a solo show for Martin’s recent tableware pieces, all exhaustively documented with photographs, some of which now illustrate the website Martin uses to sell his work. In the second half of the evening, guests drank wine, cavorted, and reclined in the wild grass of his nighttime garden. The relation to domesticated nature was thus key to the work: timed to the solstice, Midsommar involved guests reposing among flowers while they used and were adorned by clay objects. 

The queerness of Midsommar emerges through its staging of an erotic relation to the world, in which libido is multiplied out, transfuses with work, and engages a sublime natural world, one not gazed at but inhabited. In the retelling, the piece could appear fey, camp, or even satirical, depending on the modulation of the narrative. But neither irony nor narrative was the driving motor of the event. An air of almost radical, even “tenderqueer” sincerity pervaded Midsommar, lending it a kind of power, an absorption of, as well as a transcendence of, camp. The essential quality of the work was a combination of bacchanalian excess crossed with Orphic stillness and repose with nature. The work was in no sense a parody but rather a kind of homage to Englishness on the part of an immigrant – a play with alterity that carefully abjured the seduction of judgment. The art of the event radiates out from Martin’s sturdy, useful craft tableware, through the ephemeral erotic atmospheres of the event’s curation, through to the surrounding urban natural landscape, which plays its role not only as an object of consumption but as an actant in the performance’s assemblage. The queer space produced is intentionally ephemeral and notionally severed from the surrounding city landscape. In this aspirationally prefigurative setting, care is taken and care is passed around through clay objects, and it is inseparable from the pleasures taken from food, drink, bodies, and repose.

By viewing, feeling, holding, passing around, serving food and drink in, and constituting community through queer ceramics, we improvisationally craft the erotic infrastructure that keeps the queer city going. In this sense we can also accept (...) Martin’s queer craft’s complicity with and enfolding into practices of urban restructuring internationally. Eros is desublimated, but I do not read these works as utopian totems of sexual liberation, radical economic practice, or declarations of zones of autonomy. Their work orientates us to a new mode of thinking queer embeddedness within the rhythms of the city, in relation to but never outside capitalist modernity. It is a provisional response to the fragility of our re fusals, because it congeals circuits of erotic care that sustain us as we gesture our way toward a less repressive sublimation.

William Martin tells stories through objects, images, and the complex layers of meaning existing between the two, especially when they are activated by bodies and communities. For Forum: Of Hosts & Guests, organised by Open Space and curated by Katherine Finerty, Martin was invited to explore ideas of hospitality, hierarchy, ritual, and belonging in a site-specific response to the Russian cultural centre Pushkin House, just off Bloomsbury Square. On Saturday 30th April 2019 he presented The Lever, a participatory photo shoot, in collaboration with photographer Charlotte Speechley. This event aimed to invert the traditional hierarchy of viewership and rituals of dressing. Inspired by the intimate, yet public, coronation ceremony of French monarchs, Martin’s new ceramic and textile works were available for visitors to wear, creating a sense of performance and masquerade in the historic setting of Pushkin House. Along with the artist, the photographer and the site, participants will direct the work, activating it in new and personal ways. 

“A traditional exhibition may in fact disempower both artist and audience through it’s rigid social constructs of viewing over participating.” The artist reflects, “By bringing my artwork in as props for a narrative shoot, the guest is invited to become a performer, activating the artworks in new ways. The artworks I have in mind link to the architectural heritage of the building, critiquing neo-classicism and the values we have inherited from it regarding race, sex, sexuality, and personal responsibility. My new fabric works will also be available for participants to wear, creating a playful sense of dress up or masquerade in this historic music room.... A ceremony of sorts may occur, building up throughout the morning with images documenting the characters and archetypes that present themselves. This approach encourages chance encounters, thereby encouraging new ways of making sense of the work. As an artist this handing over of authorship is both terrifying and exhilarating.” 

Martin’s work is personal yet political. His multi-media and multi-disciplinary practice stems from the traditional craft of ceramics where meaning is always in the making, from the hidden histories of labour to trans-routes of trade, and the traces of power in between. In between the gaps and cracks of Martin’s 2D draughtsmanship and 3D pottery – image and object – a deep yet dissonant personhood takes shape, full of consciousness and conscientiousness. Here lies the crypt of biographical references informing the artist’s own history and sense of self: where Enlightenment thinking and Neo-classical architecture frames post-colonial guilt and the freedom of gender performativity. Through physically and psychologically pinning against ideas of masculinity and fragility, Martin’s recent body of work empowers all who see, touch, or wear it to experience the power and relief of dependence. 

The phenomenological experience initiated by the presentation of Martin’s work invites a consciousness of how structures and space can be activated by the intentionality of objects and each individual’s presence in a place. Guests are encouraged to touch, try on, and even take home the art, manifesting a level of complexity and complicity that activates objects and bodies alike. Martin’s objects draw you closer, revealing a modern day curiosity cabinet where one may find emojis and Pokémon posing on seafoam green celadon plant pots, or iconic art historical iconography from Venus mother goddesses and David underdog heroes to mythical bleeding pelicans on everyday coffee mugs. Continuing to trust your instincts there are chains to sport, genders to perform, frames to pose within, monuments to meditate upon, and apothecary jars to inspire and conspire... 

The playfully interactive meets cerebrally meditative nature of his installations suggests a bridge between a labour of love and the labour of looking. Traces of postcolonial guilt and propaganda are replaced with a renewed reflection on the freedom of fragility, power in empathy, and necessity of trust in the dichotomies of both space and self, process and people. It is within this perpetual questioning of what masculinity and community means, looks like, and feels like, that the radically feminist mantra resonates most strongly with William Martin’s work: "The personal is political". 

Martin’s first solo exhibition in London ‘OBJECT/IMAGE’ was held at Velorose in June - August 2017, with two concurrent affiliated shows in July; ‘@HOME’ saw his work transferred to a domestic setting – an inhabited apartment upstairs from the gallery, and ‘ARCH’, where this artwork was suspended at the crossing of a Neo-Gothic Grade I listed church in Highbury, London. His 2018 his summer exhibition ‘Liam’ ran from April to June and re-created a missing Soho denizen’s sitting room. Visible from the street, it was a site-specific installation situated in a Georgian town house, now the home of The Garage Soho.

This month our exhibitions are off the scale; from William Martin’s tiny installation at The Smallest Gallery in Soho to the sprawling new Royal Academy of Arts – these are the shows to marvel at both little and large.

The Lowdown: South African born ceramic artist William Martin is creating some of my favourite contemporary art right now. Liam, his latest exhibition, is an ingenious little installation behind a Georgian window in Soho. Meant to be viewed looking in from the outside, the exhibition lets us indulge our voyeuristic streak and have a good stare into the life of someone else. The exhibit is set up as a domestic space belonging to “Liam”, a character conjured up with gay culture, London life, and Martin’s art as the ingredients. What do we know about Liam? He’s in his fifties, he’s lived in Soho for decades, he collects books and art, and he’s about to be evicted by the council.

Martin’s work explores themes of masculinity, homosexuality, and colonialism, informed by his identity as a gay man raised in post-apartheid South Africa. Several pieces key to his oeuvre make their way into Liam’s sitting room, most notably his signature ceramic chains. Hand crafted from strong but brittle porcelain they are a symbol of masculinity’s fragile nature. And of course, being chains they also reference BDSM and gay culture, as do his apothecary-styled jars emblazoned with the chemical symbols for various party drugs. In a world waking up to the harm caused by toxic masculinity, Martin’s work couldn’t be more topical. He’s one to watch.

Liam is in his 50s, he has lived in Soho for the last 30 years and is about to be evicted as the council has sold his flat to property developers — sounds like a Soho gentrification story we've heard many times over.

We step into his living room with antique furniture, his medication and postcards of the places he's been on the dresser, Hogarth prints in the corner and art books scattered all around. We sit in his armchair waiting for Liam to return.

Only he never will, because this is an art project conceived by William Martin housed in the aptly named Smallest Gallery in Soho. It's a fun mix of references to the history of Soho with objects borrowed from local businesses and ceramic artworks created by Martin.

A ceramic harness references the sex industry of Soho while Pokemon characters on vases are inspired by Martin's own childhood. The pink walls are based on what was fashionable in old Georgian studies.

The more time we spend in this tiny gallery, the more we're drawn to all the fantastic little details, including newspapers on the floor, ceramic decorations copying the cornices we'd expect to find in period homes, and even poor Liam's glasses left on the drawer.

As we sit in his armchair and look out on to the street through pulled back curtains, it's a strange experience. We're watching the world go by on a busy street, but passers by either don't notice us or stare back at us as if we're on sale — we hasten to add it's not that kind of window.

The gallery is open to be viewed from the outside at any time but a free appointment may be made to go inside as well, we highly recommend being on both sides of the window as it's a different experience. If the artists happens to be around, he'll happily show you round and point out the little details many of us would miss.

This exhibition packs a lot in to a bijou space and the shows will keep changing every few months, so we look forward to stepping back inside, or just passing by outside.

‘Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made’ - Franz Kafka

In my scepticism about the future of commercial developments i am certainly not alone. The artist Will Martin currently has an exhibition in the smallest gallery in soho, which questions this very issue. the show, called ‘Liam’ after the fictitious tenant, raises the issue of habitation and belonging; basically a window display with a cultural concern, comprising household objects styled amongst Martin’s ceramic works, hand painted fabric and an especially clever use of his signature chain decorating the frieze.

A ‘missing person’ notice acts as the exhibition’s narrative: apart from going missing without his medication, the 50 something year old Liam is also forced to vacate his residence which has been sold to a property developer. certainly not a new tale but an appropriately familiar one.

The exhibit is a contextual installation, located in the rapidly changing urban environment of Soho, London; it stands in rebellion against all the windows of consumerist stores, attempting to show the loss of the neighbourhood, the ceaseless gentrification which has become so prevalent in the more colourfully diverse quarters of large European cities. 

As Quentin Crisp remarked of Old Compton street: ‘they’ve come a long way, all of it downhill…’

When I met William a few years ago, this type of urban transformation was already a concern of his; he mentioned the departure of artists studios, increased rent, popular chain stores and the changing face of Shoreditch. 

Apart from the development issue, Martin’s exhibition also invites us to look candidly inward at the personal space; the intimate relationship between our identity, our home and it’s contents, thus sharing that most valuable message: that it’s generally a short step from what is important in our lives, to what threatens our existence.

William Martin tells stories through objects, images, and the complex layers of meaning existing between the two. OBJECT / IMAGE displays recent work embracing an ethos of dependence, whether it be on the people you love, substances you socialise with, or cultural systems you define yourself by. Through three collaborative, multi-site, and site-specific installations (here at the Velorose gallery, next door in a domestic apartment, and across town in a Neo-Gothic church-turned-arts centre), this exhibition explores the architecture of physical spaces, objective ideas, and imaginative processes.

Martin’s pots are personal yet political. His multi-media and multi-disciplinary practice stems from the traditional craft of ceramics where meaning is always in the making, from the hidden histories of labour to trans-routes of trade, and the traces of power in between. In between the gaps and cracks of Martin’s 2D draughtsmanship and 3D pottery – image and object –a deep yet dissonant personhood takes shape, full of consciousness and conscientiousness. Here lies the crypt of biographical references informing the artist’s own history and sense of self: where Enlightenment thinking and Neo-classical architecture frames post-colonial guilt and the freedom of gender performativity. Through physically and psychologically pinning against ideas of masculinity and fragility, Martin’s newest body of work empowers all who see, touch, or wear it to experience the power and relief of dependence.

Furthermore, the artist’s recent epiphanic emphasis on dependence expands beyond his own personal thematic tropes by additionally applying to the collaborative constructions of Martin’s current working environment and curatorial engagements. Martin shares a studio space with Felix & Merlin Architects and thus his recent ceramics, drawings, and fabrics have been created whilst observing the ways in which architects work, think, and cooperate. For this exhibition at Velorose, Martin has responded directly to the physical fit-out and conceptual malleability of the gallery space, working closely together with its studio director David Rosenberg in an experimental spirit of collaboration, dependence, fluidity, and trust. And thus the traditions of representation summoned in Martin’s work are brought out of the studio and into the gallery through a resonant ideology in which discursive meaning is heightened through dialogical process: artist proposes, curator chooses, and viewers bear witness to the traces in between. 

A wall with tracing paper, the architect’s ultimate pre-technology tool, alludes to Martin’s original proposal for how his work might hang in Rosenberg’s purpose-built shop-cum-studio gallery, welcoming visitors to playfully compare request vs. reality and desire vs. dependence. The phenomenological experience initiated invites a consciousness of how structures and space can be activated by the intentionality of objects, curatorial control, and each individual’s presence.

Guests are encouraged to touch, try on, and even take home the art, manifesting a level of complexity and complicity that activates objects and bodies alike. Indeed after first examining Martin’s architectural sketches you might feel compelled to open the door they reside upon, revealing a modern day curiosity cabinet where one may find emojis and Pokémon posing on seafoam green celadon plant pots, or iconic art historical iconography from Venus mother goddesses and David underdog heroes to mythical bleeding pelicans on everyday coffee mugs. Continuing to trust your instincts there are chains to sport, genders to perform, frames to pose within, mother monuments to meditate upon, and apothecary jars to inspire and conspire... 

The playfully interactive meets cerebrally meditative nature of the installations occupying Velorose’s malleable space (as well as its off-site neighbouring hosts,)suggests a bridge between a labour of love and the labour of looking. Traces of postcolonial guilt and propaganda are replaced with a renewed reflection on the freedom of fragility, power in empathy, and necessity of trust in the dichotomies of both space and self, process and people. This duality breeds most potently within a pair of sleek, glossy black pots connected by a matte tactile chain. Their surface, size, and assembly seduce us to fantasise about what and who fits together, and how our touch has the capacity to connect and dismantle.

It is within this perpetual questioning of what masculinity means, looks like, and feels like, that the radically feminist mantra resonates most strongly with William Martin’s work: "The personal is political".

Shifting between fictional stories, personal memories and historical fact, William Martin weaves disparate narratives into a complex relationship. Through an associative approach he combines strands from history, archeology and philosophy to address subjects ranging from the traditions associated with sailing culture, to the archeological and colonial histories of the Western world.

Martin’s practice is an expanded ceramic practice with a social twist. Enjoying the tension between the functional heritage of pottery and its place in his practice, he constantly re-assesses the purpose of the objects he makes. The audience’s interaction with his ceramics remains important but the functional relationship is extended to a social one as Martin invents bespoke scenarios and occasions in which to play out narratives and challenge his audience to engage.

Breaking down the relationships between subjects and the traditional structures of art practices is for Martin a method of social critique. His practice plays out through a fascination with the Enlightenment period since it marks the origin of many of the institutions and systems that mould our lives today. For the summer exhibition Martin invites us into a richly constructed world with themes and storylines developed in a fictional text that play out across ceramic objects and fictional artifacts. Replaying historical narratives, his ceramics attempt to make sense of contemporary society and the way in which we approach life today.