Paige Martin
Craft Design, Jewelry, Mixed Media
Paige Martin makes curious and touch-provoking pieces with a methodology oriented around the body. She is also an award-winning dancer, choreographer, and performer, with a private practice in Zero Balancing, an osteopathic body-mind therapy. Her adjacent design background in fabrication, installation, interiors, and architectural finishes combined with these somatic practices, give her a dynamic approach to object-making.
Her WOODS line, primarily wooden rings, first inspired by beach debris and driftwood, now incorporates a curio-cabinet of materials. Existing in the context of object rather than jewelry, WOODS are constructed much like furniture, sculpture, or toys. She prefers wood to metals for its potential neutrality and temporality, and wood’s distinction from the historical connotations of gold and silver jewelry. Rather than serving as a symbol of femininity, marker of status, or representation of beauty, a wooden piece can stand alone as pure adornment, and without the confines of gender.
Paige’s recent larger works begin as drawings, and often require a entirely new set of skills and techniques to be undertaken. Using minimal tools, pieces are built by hand, and through this process link to the lineage of makers throughout time. In this way, objects become inherently related to our personal and collective histories. Her stylistic approach is a simple, paired-down aesthetic embedded in industrial and furniture design, and very much linked to motifs common to antiquity and prehistory.
Paige continues to dance and tour. She currently works with here projects as co-curator and designer. Since emerging as a maker of small objects and wooden rings, she has designed sets for theater and dance, and presented work in gallery and design-platform environments. Her pieces have been featured in the shops of Paul Kasmin Gallery, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Hammer Museum, and MaRS.
Art Tour Stop 19: Residential Studio
