Michelle Yi Martin
Godwit, 2023
Silk, monofilament, wood, horsehair, and cotton
Courtesy of the artist and Municipal Bonds, San Francisco.
Michelle Yi Martin is an accomplished and experimental weaver, often incorporating non-traditional materials like paper, latex balloons, or glass in her woven works. Her holistic investigation of the medium also utilizes photographic mediums to capture weaving in novel ways, using cyanotype as one method to capture the complexity of warp and weft threads against a monochromatic ground.
In Godwit (2023), Yi Martin uses horsehair as the warp threads. These nearly invisible strands provide the structure for thicker, more visible pieces of gold silk and monofilament to loosely snake through the matrix of horsehair. Two semicircles of wood seem to float in space, providing curvature and a third dimension for the otherwise flat weaving. Notably, the shadow cast by the horsehair is more visible than the material itself; it is only upon close inspection that the individual strands become clear.
Michelle Yi Martin’s parents immigrated to the Bay Area from Korea. Her journey of discovering where she fits in the Bay Area led her to admire its Do-It-Yourself, experimental ethos, where communities are supportive rather than competitive.
Photos courtesy of Henrik Kam.
ARTIST BIO
Michelle Yi Martin (b. 1977, Seoul, South Korea) is a multi-disciplinary artist and self-taught weaver based in San Francisco, California. Yi Martin has been an educator of the humanities, interdisciplinary art, and progressive education for over 20 years. She has developed an art practice in this intersection of history, human engagement, craft, experimentation, and fine art.
Yi Martin earned a BA from Santa Clara University, CA, and an MA from the University of San Francisco, where she became active in the Teaching for Excellence and Social Justice Program. She completed residencies at Textilsetur in Blönduós, Iceland (2017); the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, CT (2019); and the Space Program in San Francisco (2020). Additionally, she received a grant from the Danish Arts Council to exhibit her work in Aarhus, Denmark (2019).
Yi Martin presented her first solo exhibition with Municipal Bonds in San Francisco (2021), followed by her first museum solo at the Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA (2022). She has exhibited in group shows with the Textile Center in Iceland; Ovartaci Museum in Denmark; Nationale in Portland, OR; Round Weather in Oakland, CA; the Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA; Venetia Initiatives in New York, NY; and Grove Collective in London, UK. She was a contributing artist at Black Mountain College, Ashville, NC. Her experimental “weaving of light” was featured as part of the Anni Albers exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT (2020) and the Copenhagen Light Festival (2022).
Beyond her individual practice, Yi Martin collaborates with other multi-disciplinary artists to produce integrated works of music, dance, light installations, and animation. Her work with the artist collective ESG was featured on the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage in Dumbo, Brooklyn, as part of the Light Year installations (2021). She will also collaborate with a fellow artist as participants of the upcoming Craft and Design Biennale in Copenhagen. Additionally, she has been awarded commissions for permanent artwork installations by Meta Open Arts (2022) and San Francisco’s newly developed Pier 70 (2023). She is represented by Municipal Bonds.
