Blandine Martin

Based in London since 1988, Blandine Martin is a French-born textile artist whose deeply personal and evocative work explores the complexities of human emotion through the lens of her own family history. Her practice delves into themes of loss, memory, and legacy — where the past and present merge through a tactile narrative of reclaimed fabrics, cherished objects, and faded photographs. Each piece is a quiet act of remembrance, an attempt to stitch together the fragments of identity that linger long after loved ones are gone.

​

Martin’s creative journey is rooted in a life surrounded by art. Her father, an abstract painter and sculptor, exposed her early on to a world where creative expression was simply part of everyday life. Despite initially pursuing architecture and interior design, it wasn’t until  the birth of her daughter  Ava, that she began to slowly reconnect with visual art. A turning point came in 2018, following the sudden passing of her mother. The intensity of grief catalysed a radical transformation in her practice, steering her away from painting towards textiles and sculpture — a medium that allowed for intimacy, vulnerability, and emotional layering.

​

Much of Martin’s work since then has centred on that moment of loss. One particularly powerful piece features a large tapestry, laden with photo transfers and sewn-in fragments of her mother’s personal belongings. The installation, complete with furniture and sound, recreates the emotional weight of walking into a loved one’s empty home — where everyday objects become monuments to absence. It is in these seemingly mundane remnants that Martin finds beauty, pain, and the raw imprint of memory. “Everything in that space felt so heavy with her absence,” she recalls. “It was like she had just left the room.”

​

Trained through the Advanced Textile course at City Lit, and further developing her practice through The Other MA (TOMA) and the MASS Correspondence Course, Blandine Martin works at the intersection of memory, material, and emotional inheritance. Her early work emerged from personal grief, using stitch, found objects, and damaged domestic forms as a way to process loss. Over time, this evolved into a deeper exploration of the body as landscape — shaped by time, marked by care, and transformed through experience. Her artistic voice flourished in this space — unafraid to blend structure with spontaneity, embroidery with rust, memory with myth. There is an intentional imperfectness to her pieces: bruised textures, broken chairs, and faded prints all contribute to what she calls a “beautiful mess.” For Martin, this is not only a visual style but a philosophy — a way to reflect the truth of life, grief, and femininity.

​

Blandine Martin’s art is a kind of ongoing conversation — with her mother, with history, the female body and the land. In each piece, Martin invites us to reflect on our own internal geographies: the stories we inherit, the objects we carry, and the silences that shape us.Through each stitch and object, she seeks not only to make peace with the past, but also to understand it. In doing so, her work becomes a space for others to reflect on their own stories, their own silences, and the objects that quietly outlive us all.

​

​www.blandinemartin.wixsite.com

Instagram: @blandinem_art

​