https://www.martanormington.com/inspirations daily 0.75 2018-07-25 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5a882d7c0d9297112db759d4/1518874117534/ Research & Inspirations https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/5a73baea9140b77e46b6e29f/5a73bb00e4966b054744a5b7/1517533956307/Inspirations+Mood+Board_lines.jpg Research & Inspirations https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/5a73baea9140b77e46b6e29f/5a8b186108522933c2444053/1532515443696/Inspirations+Mood+Board_lines_smaller1.jpg Research & Inspirations https://www.martanormington.com/projects daily 1.0 2019-02-24 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5a89e858e4966ba44f0a1792/1518987926366/Inspirations+Mood+Board_lines_with+border.jpg Projects bbbbbbbbbb https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5a76142553450ac909366091/1517784868276/ Projects https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5a877adf0d9297112da22008/1518830789479/ Projects - C.P. (aka Cloud Planets) 2014 inkjet prints on archival photo paper, 23 x 23 cm   The project is a result of a prolonged immersion in observing the clouds from my bedroom window. The habit of watching the sky began during a one-year-long stay in a Buddhist monastery in a remote valley in the Indian Himalayas in 2007-2008. The capricious and changeable nature of the sky, became a fascination ever since. The work developed over a period of time and the photographs form together a private cloud-planet collection. The colours and shapes of each individual image reflect both: the fleeting materiality of cloud manifestations in the environment and the mental states that are being evoked by looking at the sky. The circle has no beginning and no ending, it is a symbol of transitoriness and rolling chance. Past, present and future seamlessly merge into it. In space all liquid particles are suspended in a spherical form, so is our breath when we try to breathe under water, releasing little balls of air into it. The boundaries of our physical world are circular too: in the form of the planet we live on. According to scientists, water (which in a cloud is in the lightest of its forms) has ‘memory’- it ‘remembers’ what it came in contact with, the temperature it experienced and the energies that impacted it. Can it then mean that a certain cloud formation above a city or a town reflects the sum of the changing emotional states of its inhabitants? https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5a8d990d8165f569eeab3e1a/1518826672865/ Projects - I Can’t Remember Where I’ve Been 2017, UV prints on transparent plexiglass, various dimensions and sizes   Places divide life into sections. Smaller chunks of life; parallel universes suspended in their own private dimensions, with borders and inscribed rules of conduct, with time suspended in them, like in small pools of water. You can take a dip and change your style, duties and personality, but only for a while, as none of them are permanent or stable. You belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Between places: a permanent transit zone. Sometimes the transit takes as much time as being in a place, sometimes longer. The images outside a car window fly by in an incessant succession of sameness. Sometimes they are quite beautiful - especially when they blur; softening the borders of reality with the speed of a moving car and the detachment its protective walls of steel and glass offer. I Can’t Remember Where I’ve Been relates to the state of suspension in the zone of being in-between, reflecting on the experience of travel and being on the road, and its contemplative and immersive character, not necessarily related to any particular place. When spending more time on the road, the pre-established borders between geography, images, literature and dream begin to blur. Places and spaces dissolve and merge with each other, becoming a part of our being, shaping our perception of the surrounding world. The so-called objective geographical space is no longer relevant. We begin journeying in the area of subjective geography which creates certain feelings, states and memories, and the movement that we then become contains also the movement of our thoughts. The fleeting images encountered when travelling between places are fixed onto car-window sized transparent plexi-glass cut outs. They become physical objects with memory: visual mementoes of the places seen and felt, inscribed within them.   https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5aa570d20d92979ac96f080e/1520781852810/ Projects Journey as a State of Mind, solo exhibition, installation view, Gallery BWA, Bydgoszcz, PL, 2017 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5adca2aa88251bb54e26862c/1524409002492/ Projects - Munich to Bydgoszcz by Water. A mental journey.  2017, mixed media (intervention into a found object: paper arrows on a large school map of Europe). Project created for the solo exhibition "Journey as a State of Mind" at the Gallery BWA, Bydgoszcz, PL (02-04.2017) It is often assumed that the shortest way is the best. Our globe is entwined with a network of shortest routes, set in place by the smooth asphalt of motorways, fuel consumption efficiency limitations, lines of air travel destination networks, commercial trading routes, politically and economically regulated trans-border migration traffic. I sometimes wonder: what is the route that fish in the oceans and seas take? Or drops of water, or grains of sand? What do they encounter on their enigmatic non-human ways? And is one way of traveling better than another? Our species, is becoming more and more entangled in a web of constant shortcuts, technological conveniences and ever increasing efficiency. Urban human beings lead lives increasingly in tune with the operating rhythms of machines, the closed circuits of computer networks, and the algorithm loops that govern them. The changing characteristics of the natural environment - its shifting seasons, its fluctuating climate, the life of plants and animals, disappear into the blurry, distant background of existential concerns. What could we learn about the surrounding world, if we took an unexpected journey, far off the well trodden paths, by following the global flows of water (even if only in our thoughts)? This journey would be very different from the most obvious "straight line”. What various beings, people and worlds would we encounter on this meandering voyage? Is the shortest way to reach our aim always the best one? Does it really pay off to do what is the quickest? What are the implications of always choosing the shortcut and the most short-term beneficial path? I invite the viewer to a mental journey, with this special map, from Munich, where I currently live, to Bydgoszcz, where my exhibition opens tonight. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5c604bdb8165f527b77855d3/1549814747907/ Projects - Symbiotic Real Selfie: Me and My Friend from the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction (or the Manifesto for Reflective Coexistence and Solidarity with Non-Human Beings) “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?” - Michel de Montaigne One day walking across his field in central Poland, my father found a strange looking rock. He showed it to me, laughing out loud. I felt immediately drawn to the bizarre stone. In Japan people believe that strange looking natural formations have souls. I was curious about the soul of the rock. After consulting the scientists at the local university, the ‘stone’ turned out to be an over 200-million-year old fossil of a coral that grew in the shallow tropical waters of the Thetys Ocean that covered the whole area where my family home (and the rest of Europe) is located today. Almost as if I had suddenly found a long lost relative, I felt an immediate bond with my new, yet ancient, non-human friend. Who was the land owner in this context, and who was the guest? And what was my life from the point of view of a 200-million-year old being? Me and the Coral created this project together, as a kind of Inter-Species Manifesto, announcing and exploring our close and intimate human-non-human bond: across time, space and species divides. Me - providing the surprisingly brief temporality of movement in space and the speculations of ongoing thought processes; the Coral - supplying the intuitive force of ages, grounding me in a freshly ancient time perspective. Together we stand for the pan-species communication and symbiosis. It is no longer enough to simply care about oneself. We are both, what philosopher Timothy Morton calls, 'the Symbiotic Real' of our worldly dwelling: together we create a situation in which it’s not quite clear who is host and who parasite. In the face of Deep Time, the established anthropocentric hierarchies begin to crumble. Our duration will be outlived by many non-human creatures. Maybe it's not too late to make friends with beings that we are co-creating this planet with? https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5c71b9d49140b72b900a113d/1550957012026/ Projects - Journey as a State of Mind. Artist book - exhibition catalogue, BWA Gallery, Bydgoszcz, PL, 2017 Book design: Marta Normington, Katarzyna Tużylak Text: Jagna Domżalska https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5c726723ee6eb02c2ae33fe4/1551001379908/ Projects - One Hundred Thousand Steps 2015/2017 One month and 600 km of walking. An ancient pilgrimage trail. Three protagonists. Heat, dust, rain. The trouble of carrying - apart from a rather heavy backpack - one's own body and mind. The number ‘one hundred thousand’ refers to a Buddhist preliminary practice of physical repetition, preparing the spiritual aspirant to enter the path towards enlightenment. It is a practice of emptying the mind of accumulated habitual tendencies and negative deeds, by a repetitive, physical act of concentrated effort. Pilgrimage in many religions and cultures is seen as a way of emotional and spiritual purification. It is a journey that induces shedding of one’s own ‘old skin’ and a new mental rebirth. Constant repetition of the same simple act of placing one foot ahead of the other, creates a trans-like meditative state. The rhythm of one’s own heartbeat provides a constant sound background to the fluidity of the surrounding scenery. Walking becomes a discovery of being constantly in the flow of things and, yet, at the same time, a dreary act of physical extortion and the boredom of stillness in a constant movement. Being in flux provides one with a constant flow of images. They happen and multiply like the manifold realities encountered along the way. One moment replaces the other. A wave flows over another wave. Documentary notes taken with a small, portable camera, while in constant movement. Not stopping for too long to look for the right angle or composition; not thinking too hard about the meaning. Just walking with the camera as a technical diary, a transcript of surrounding visual realities, filtered through the black and white distancing tool of technical image, as a record of momentary, fleeting life as it passes us by. [a small selection of images here] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5c7268d2c8302512423adaef/1551001810458/ Projects - All The Corners Of My Room (Some Reflexions On a Boxed Existence) 2014/2017, mixed media "Something is true because it resembles something real, but at the same time a lie, because it is only a reminder" - Ludwig Feuerbach A photograph as an object is flat. Yet, as Susan Sontag writes, it is ‘a thin layer of space and time’. Intrigued by the selectivity and fragmented nature of all photographic depictions, through the series All the Corners of My Room, I am confronting the experience of space and time, in the process of photographic image construction. The ceiling lines above my head become the focal point of a search for meanings of closed, angular spaces, we tend to spend our urban lives in. The variety of the individual shots comes from the process of exploring the inhabited space by visual ‘scanning’, when one is confronted with a new or unknown place. When assembling photocopied ‘flat’ photographs, an illusion of three-dimensional space suddenly emerges. Recreating the impression of a place from one’s own memory and the material traces of light (and their computational translations into electric impulses) recorded by a camera, creates an abstraction. The visual raw data recorded by human eye constantly takes part in a complex internal process of translation and making sense of our immediate surroundings. Through the free assembling of fragments, impossible figures emerge, which nevertheless, have “real components” of light reflected from the surface of objects in the form of photographs. Does this mean that these abstract spaces exist or not? And is it possible that our ideas and opinions about the world we live in are formed in a similar way? https://www.martanormington.com/documentary-photography daily 0.75 2018-07-27 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5a8b142cc83025f59ad8ba99/1519064117289/chaddar+cave.png Documentary Photography https://www.martanormington.com/about daily 0.75 2019-03-18 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a73afff80bd5efb43a483d2/t/5adc9171562fa77ceb048bc1/1532686402693/DSC_0200.JPG About - About Marta Normington is a mixed media artist, documentary photographer and independent researcher. She is a graduate of the Multimedia Communication Department at University of Arts in Poznan, Poland, and in 2016 was nominated for the 37th Maria Dokowicz Prize for best MFA Diploma of the Year. She has studied Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, UK, as well as cross-cultural Psychology (M.A./M.Sc.) and Tibetology in Warsaw, and spent a year living in a remote Buddhist monastery in Zangskar, in the Himalaya. Marta currently lives and works between Munich (DE) and Poznan (PL). Occasionally she also resides in the Peak District (UK) and Mazowsze (PL). She spends much time travelling between places.