I’m a textile artist and printmaker based in Philadelphia. Printing on repurposed textiles makes up the backbone of my work, engaging with the idea of memory as a living story told through the language of craft. My recent art quilts explore the relationship that infrastructure and interior space has with memory and how this shapes the stories we tell.

Through my art quilts, I seek to reconstruct the physicality of memory, in turn creating an entirely new moment. I find that physical spaces hold the keys to our memories. My work begins with the memory of a place and elucidates it into a layered physical form, often textile. Much like memory itself, the final piece is not an accurate representation of the place or time, but the build up of layers creates something that retains the essence of what was once there. This practice explores the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, digging into the gap between what was and what we have made it to be. What does that gap tell us, and how can we seek peace within it? How can we hold more than one truth in our hands?

I’m interested in the physicality and build up of information through the use of surface design, screen print, appliqué, and image transfer techniques. Much of my work engages with the concept of temporality, and the way fabric, like place, can act as a physical embodiment of time, symbolic of the past while recontextualized in the present. I’m drawn to the unintentional assemblages of the everyday that are the storytellers of our world: a cluttered unfinished basement, peeling layers of billboard, here today and gone tomorrow. Through a careful textile recreation, I hope to deepen our practice of witnessing the everyday.

I find printmaking to be an appropriate medium for this idea. The memory of a place holds so much information, but is built up from layers of different moments that come together to create a space in our heads that feels so real we can step inside and walk around, yet is so intangible. Print’s ability to both accurately transfer imagery, and the ways in which it fails and leaves marks from the process, exemplifies this experience. In my practice, I consider fiber to be a living thing, one that can be shaped and changed and degrade like any other animal. This act of transfer onto something living, and where those transfer methods succeed and fail, communicates the fraught nature of memory, always nearing something that is impossible to grasp.

Whether or not my work takes the form of a quilt, the practice of linking together different materials, moments, and memories is inherent to my process, and in this way quilting is a touchstone from which all my practice grows from, and is connected back to.

Martina graduated from Oberlin College in May 2024 with a Bachelors in Studio Art.