Monday, April 27, 2015

Sabrina Brooks- Weekly Artist Post

Martin Hill




I think that there is something beautiful about a person who can find the odd and unusual in the world.  That is why I am personally drawn to the otherworldly landscapes of Martin Hill. Now he obviously creates sculptures to fit the environments that he places them in and that is what is unique about him. He makes each image so carefully that each sculpture, no matter what element it is make form, belongs in the setting he places it in.  Most of the sculptures that he creates are geometric and more specifically, spherical.  He creates the occasional organic, humanoid shape as well. Most of his landscapes have the subject placed in the mid-ground which seems like the most appropriate place to peak the viewers interest.
Hill’s style seems to be to take the basic four elements, fire, water, earth and air and mixing them with one another by placing a natural sculpture in an environment that has a contrasting element.  Hill’s aim seems to be to manipulate an existing environment to be more surreal and fantastical.   There seems to be an importance placed on the creation of these sculptures from completely natural resources. Perhaps, Hill is thinking that same way that I am thinking when tackling photographic depictions of nature.

In my research for the final project of this course, I wanted to find people who take seemingly ordinary landscapes and manipulate the perspective of the subject into being something utterly new and perhaps even zoomorphic.   Hill not only achieves this goal but he also instills the mindset that nature should not be destroyed in order to depict nature in a photograph. For instance, making a sculpture out of ice and placing it in a lake does not alter cause any harm to the environment whatsoever, whereas a plastic sculpture has the potential to do so. All in all, Hill creates these fantastical scenes without harming the environment around him…besides the occasional controlled fire of course.

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