Hindsight
Royal Adelaide Hospital, SA
December 3 2018 - January 24 2019
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“Hindsight is the ability to understand and realise something about an event after it has happened, although you did not understand or realise it at the time.” Collins English Dictionary.
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Kirsty Martinsen’s career as an artist has been significantly influenced by her diagnosis with MS while on a scholarship at New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture around the turn of the millennium.
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Her art practice has evolved in response to the many physical and emotional challenges she has encountered as a result of the disease. She now uses the wheels of her chair, mops and collaborations with other artists to create large-scale works, some of which will be exhibited at the new Royal Adelaide Hospital in December.
“Hindsight is delicious and extremely valuable,” Martinsen says. “The two drawings, Self Portrait 2008-18 and Make Me 2002-18 show a physical and emotional self that is gone.”
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In Self Portrait 2008-18 a figure stands between a woman in a wheelchair and a wheelchair tyre print.
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“This work incorporates elements of me from 2008 and before; It was my practice to paint a quick, one hour self portrait when I arrived at the studio in the morning and the standing figure is one of those; a self portrait in a wheelchair from 2015 drawn in charcoal on recycled watercolours and drawings; and the marks from my wheelchair tyres of 2018.”
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As the world reeled in the aftershock of 9/11, Martinsen was diagnosed with MS. She says the work Make Me 2002-18, incorporates abstract painting from 2002 done with a broom and walked all over when her head was full of the war within her own body, attached to a drawing of tyre tracks from her wheelchair, boot prints and tyre tread.
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“This is the past informing the present in a weirdly prophetic way. I can no longer make foot or boot prints and I use mops and brooms to paint with now, although with nowhere near the physical strength I did in 2002,” Martinsen says.
For Martinsen, hindsight has a way of simplifying what was in fact very complex.
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“It’s very difficult when you’re at the beginning of a journey such as MS to know how to navigate it. And very easy with the benefit of hindsight to look back in judgement,” she says.
“Would I do things differently if I had my time again? No. And these drawings are testament to this.”
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Words by Amanda Pepe
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Excerpts from Adelaide Review. Full article linked here.
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All works photographed by Alex Makeyev.
