Where Matter Becomes Memory


Contact
jrmartingc@gmail.com

About Me

I was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1960. Although my professional career has been linked for decades to institutional graphic design and visual communication, I have always maintained a deep connection with artistic creation.
My background in marine engineering, technical drawing and graphic design, together with later studies in Applied Arts specialising in volume, has shaped a practice in which technique and material are in constant dialogue. After years of working in a more private and experimental sphere, I have returned to sculpture as my primary language in order to explore the relationship between object, time and environment.

Artist Statement

My work begins from a simple idea: matter is never neutral. Every object carries the trace of its use, its context and its time. I work with found and reclaimed materials — industrial remnants, domestic fragments, eroded wood, oxidised metals — because I am interested in how time changes not only their form, but also their meaning.

In Responsibility, the starting point was ethical: to reuse what we discard and give it a second life as artwork. Recovering an object also means recognising our part in its fate and in the impact we have on the natural environment.

In Symbolic Journey, that transformation shifts towards sculptural language. Through the figure of the fish reinterpreted across different styles in art history, I observe how form changes according to cultural context. The same motif moves through different periods and shows that meaning is never fixed.

In Archaeologies of the Anthropocene, waste becomes stratum. The coastline appears as an archive where the natural and the industrial mix together. What we throw away does not disappear; it remains and becomes part of the landscape.

These projects share the same concern: how time transforms matter, form and memory. I am interested in the moment when something stops fulfilling its original function and begins to be read differently. That is where meaning appears.

My work does not aim to provide definitive answers. It simply invites careful attention. Looking at what we leave behind is one way of understanding who we are.

Where Matter Becomes Memory

“A sculptural exploration of the transformation of objects, the passage of time, and the traces we leave in the landscape.”