Martha Orbach
Attempt at Home #10
Assemblage
2020
Attempt at Home#10 Ingredients: Japanese knotweed, clay, old wallpaper, to-do lists, polystyrene, vest, mortgage statement, plaster, receipts.
Martha Orbach is a Glasgow-based artist who makes work about home, migration, and our relationship with our environment.
Her current work circles around the phrase To Build a Home and investigates the material, emotional, and physical processes involved in doing this amidst a time of global crises. The small structures, prints and animation draw on her Jewish heritage, unusual environmentalist upbringing, and current situation as a domestically incompetent new mum trying to make a home.
Interested in affect and the interaction between substance and the immaterial, she uses drawing, darkroom techniques, and mono-printing to explore these themes and has recently returned to making skills learned in her childhood such as basketry and ceramics. Her work often combines analogue and digital processes, text and image, fact and fiction.
The daughter of a radical environmentalist, her work explores how we navigate our fragile world and live with an understanding of the impacts of the Anthropocene. Henri Bosco stated: “When the shelter is sure the storm is good”. But what if it’s not? This is a question that informs much of her current thinking. Utilising the the flotsam and jetsum of domestic life, she weaves and sticks together small structures which explore possibilities of multispecies habitation.
Her work investigates life in the aftermath, trying to put the pieces together, this precarious process, and the incessant push pull of order and chaos.
Her work’s been shown at Photofusion, A.P.T Gallery, Royal Scottish Academy, Melbourne International Animation Festival, Streetlevel Photoworks, and Ty Pawb. She’s worked with musicians, communities, and scientists, including at Bethlem Royal Hospital, TATE, Glasgow Botanic Gardens, and Freedom from Torture. She won a fringe award at Deptford X and the Word and Image Prize at V&A Inspired by… She studied at the University of East Anglia, London College of Communication and Camberwell College of Art.
