THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

No one is sure where she went.  Like Huck Finn, she lit out for the territories, travelling off-grid, into open space.  She re-emerged at a café-gas station in Cuba, New Mexico in 1968, pulling in and asking the manager if he knew of any land for rent.  By chance, his wife had a property available, and so, at the age of fifty-six, Martin moved up to a remote mesa twenty miles across dirt roads from the nearest highway.  No electricity, no phone, no neighbours; not even a shelter to move into.  For the first few months, she focused her energy on building, working from scratch and mostly alone.  She made a one-room dwelling out of adobe bricks she shaped herself, and then a log-cabin studio from trees she cut down with a chainsaw.  It was in this latter space that she began to inch towards art again, first prints, then drawings, then the luminous work of her maturity.

Laing/Weather