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She’ll say anyone can do it. “You just have to be able to rip and glue.” But it’s the way she does it that sets Martha Johnson’s collages above mere craft.
A petite and pretty towhead, she looks like a kid in the playpen she calls her studio at the KDH Cooperative Art Gallery near the Post Office in Kill Devil Hills. Yet the resulting work belies childish fancy. Martha’s work reveals the deep thinker within, and her designs are infused with the pain and wonder of her personal casserole of experiences communicating compassion, insight and humor.
Overflowing with textured, colorful papers and scraps of every sort, paint, shells, photos, beach glass, rubberstamps, postage stamps and oddball whatnots, the studio barely has enough remaining space for Martha. Frames-in-waiting are suspended from an overhead beam that is draped with the skin of a boa constrictor she can’t bear to use. Because Martha is known to view just about everything as potential material for her mixed-media work, a friend had given her the snake’s old coat thinking she could layer pieces of it in to her collages. But
to Martha it’s already a fine work of nature’s art, too dear to tear apart.
Anything and everything else seems to be fair game, however, and when Martha jumps in to work, the outflow is impressive. Martha doesn’t rest. Even without the ever-present need to make a living, she would work.
Rock, Scissors, Paper. She’s the paper and she has survived her share of hard rocks.
She doesn’t recall any early influences during her upbringing in northeastern Ohio or her college years at Ann Arbor, Michigan, that set her on an artistic course, although she did say that, peripherally, it was there. There were artists in her mother’s family, and she enjoyed making cards using collage to express her affection and feelings to family and friends.
“I never thought of myself as an artist,” Martha said.
She wanted to be a midwife but ended up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as a Home Health and Hospice nurse where she cared for the sick and dying for more than a decade. Surrounded by heartache on a daily basis and weary of the stress, she found her smile and solace in making beeswax candles with her younger sister, Sarah, and handmade cards with her older sister, Rachel, a photographer.
Slowly, she ventured out and began to sell her art. Her nursing went from overtime to part-time, and she eventually gave it up entirely. Galleries began to carry her work, and she, loving to travel, began to exhibit and sell at art shows as far north as Pennsylvania. She moved to the Outer Banks with her artist beau and they lived on a boat. First, on Ocracoke Island where she had vacationed with her family as a child, and later they took up a mooring in Manteo. A year later he died unexpectedly, and Martha’s grief was immeasurable.
Unsure about her future, and without any particular plan, her life course seemed to be on autopilot. She toyed with returning to Chatham County, but ended up house-sitting here at the beach for a friend. Then, the opportunity to join the artistic community at the KDH Cooperative Art Gallery presented itself, and Martha gained a family of another sort and the affirmation that comes with it.
Participating artists contribute 10 hours a month at the front desk and
in return enjoy a lower commission on the sale of their art. For visitors, the Cooperative gives them a direct relationship with the artist, to put a face with a name. Martha finds the same holds true with the many art shows she attends, as many as 20 in a year. She finds this outreach reduces the feeling of isolation so many artists experience. This is important for Martha because she isn’t just putting the work out there, she is communicating.
Martha’s imagery frequently includes a message, a quote or proverb. Although she doesn’t consider herself a writer, she savors words; they excite her. In her smaller work, her handmade cards for example, one might read an Eskimo legend:
“Perhaps they are not the stars in the sky, but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy.”
Lately Martha has found pleasure in her larger, mixed-media mosaics of mermaids bearing monikers such as Bahama Momma and Goddess of the Sea. They are a tesserae of graceful beach glass creatures with swirling raffia hair and coral fan tails, adorned with cone shells on their chests, placed in a way that brings Madonna to mind. Martha recalled with a smile a remark made by a young girl.
“Is she wearing shells as a bra?”
“No,” Martha said, “Those are her breasts.”
It is in those moments, smiling moments, that Martha Johnson finds delight, and it is enough. Stronger and more self-directed now, she has seen her way clear of bleak times, and for now, her blithe spirit is reigning.
As one of her collages reads: “The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears or the sea. – Isak Dinesen” |
