Sibylla Martin’s paintings are a quiet acknowledgement of the state of our world, avoiding personal experience and seeking a universal one. With their anti-narrative form, they choose not to add commentary to issues already saturated with opinion and influence.
In Martin’s own words, “If you look at a narrative painting your brain is bombarded with a lifetime’s worth of associations and memories. I want you to go straight inside yourself without demands or questions. I want colour to express itself and not to be restricted by having to describe something.”
Martin loves the craft of painting. She primes and stretches the canvas herself, something she considers an integral part of her process. Wanting to really know colours, she used to grind the pigments and oil herself and usually spends hours mixing colours instead of putting them on the canvas.
There is a lot of physicality to Martin’s process, the dimensions of her large paintings needing to be human scale.
Experimentation, disruption and detours are at the heart of her process. Often, she will bury colours that are too bright or too real with layers of something more subtle and true to the feeling she is moving through at the time. On a gallery wall, all these elements come together in paintings that are deep as they are wide; portals into landscapes of colour and feeling.
Martin has exhibited in various group exhibitions in Kenya and the UK. Her first exhibition in Nairobi was a solo show at RaMOMA in 2006. She was one of six artists who participated in Circle’s celebrated first exhibition Abstract Extract Subtract in 2013. Sibylla graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1991 and won both Slade prizes whilst studying there. She moved to Kenya in 2004 after a period of working as a nurse in Rwanda and Burundi.
