Meet Elysabeth Martin, Fine Artist in Savannah

Today we’d like to introduce you to Elysabeth Martin.

Elysabeth, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Growing up, I had a lot of questions and a lot of anxiety about the lack of answers. I grew up in a suburb north of Dallas, Texas named Allen, TX where I grew up surrounded by my entire immediate family. I know and understand how lucky I got in the family department, especially because my mom raised me by herself, without the help of my father. The base of my anxiety as a kid was most likely thanks to my dad not being around mixed in with kids at my elementary and middle school being horrible to me about my weight which caused a lot of grief for me as a child and has definitely left a mark on my journey into adulthood. I knew growing up that I wanted to love what I did in terms of my career. So, during my freshman year of high school, I decided to tackle three big things: 1). Architecture/Interior Design 2.) Visual Arts (including Film/TV, animation, and photography) 3.) American Sign Language. I was required to take a foreign language at the time, so ASL stuck with me for three years and it was the most rewarding experience being able to walk away and have conversations with Deaf people in my surrounding community (and even now! I’m just not as educated on my vocabulary as I used to be), whenever given the opportunity to (especially at the ice cream shop I worked at during HS!) but I didn’t feel like I could do the best job as an interpreter, so I really focused heavily on my creative classes. Before I took my intro to visual arts class, I decided to take the architecture/interior design class and BOY was it a BUST. I love(d) math but for some reason couldn’t figure out how to calculate the dimensions for a fence… so, I moved on pretty quickly but still have an interest somewhere in the back of my head for designing interior spaces. The intro to visual arts class was where something really clicked in my head but only really for photography. Making short films was something I am NOW interested in, but it was rough in the beginning. And don’t even get me started on trying to do a 10 second stop motion video, I cannot–I repeat, cannot– do that for ya.

After my interest was sparked for photography, I decided to hop on board my high school’s photography program that I would be involved in until I walked across the stage and got the hell out of Texas. I think the main thing that kept pushing me to become more educated in photography was my high school’s darkroom that was literally a closet…turned into a darkroom. I never got to do much in it, because looking back with the knowledge I have now, nothing was entirely correct. All I did in the darkroom during my high school years were some photograms that I was never excited about, but I was intrigued by the process and what the darkroom could be for me. I lost a personal connection with my work in high school, and I attribute it to doing everything digitally. Even though we had a darkroom, I never used it to develop black and white film, just some basic and amateur photograms like I said and by the end of high school, I was hungry to learn more about the history of photography and the process within photography, i.e., darkroom and other shooting formats. My eagerness to learn more about photo and also express myself creatively drove me and pushed me to apply to one out of two schools I had toured and was heavily considering for college. My first choice was the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, GA and my second option was Columbia College Chicago. Both colleges offered me a glimpse into a world I hadn’t even known existed and after touring both of them, I knew art school was something I wanted to do not just to learn more about photography, but about art and creativity. So, I applied to SCAD and got in. On a different note, I wanted to get the hell out of Texas and away from home. Knowing that it would push me out of my comfort zone, I didn’t know that’s what my art and my relationship to my art needed. Moving to Savannah changed my life in multiple aspects. I was finally around fellow artists, ones that quickly would become close friends, driving ourselves to pure insanity at times creating projects and deciding what was next, but it is a rush I LIVE and LOVE.

Since getting to Savannah, I’ve focused my photography (and also printmaking!) to be a projection of myself and honestly, therapy. I still struggle a lot with my mental health, but I have a few more answers than I have in the past. I’ve made work about childhood traumas that still follow me, my body image, identity, sexuality, family, religion, and my struggle with mental illnesses. A lot of my work is personal and intimate, it’s me trying to solve a problem in my head, or trying to create memories that hold heavy emotion. I create things that grab my eye, or that I think is funny or strange, and I create these things hoping to find someone else, somewhere else, that may get a little chuckle or see a situation in their own life with a new light. I know I still have a lot of questions unanswered, but I hope to touch and share all aspects of myself with the world, in order to hopefully reach one person who may understand, start a conversation, and stand with them, ready to tackle the next question in my head.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It definitely has not been smooth sailing, although I really wish it were at times, but if it was, then what’s the point? You know? Most of my work has some heavy narrative behind it that I want my audience to perceive as they wish, but knowing and understanding that even though my work is about my story and how I got to this point in my life, I know there are others who have felt the same way in similar situations, and that’s why I persevere through whatever it is that I am doing. For me, it’s about starting a conversation that can lead to something bigger. For example, any work I do about the lack of relationship I have with my father is extremely triggering and never a smooth sail. Him not being around put a lot of questions about self-worth in my head at a young age that has sent my emotions on a rollercoaster of anger to relief to depression even now. On a different note, self-portraits for me and series that are entirely based on self-portraits are really hard because of the intense bullying I went through during elementary and middle school. It’s strange looking back to think that kids can be that nasty and cruel, and how one word could cause me to go home and silently sob as I rocked back and forth to try and calm down. At the end of the day, I know my emotional approach makes my work stronger and worth it to me because I care so much about the work I am doing. I’ve touched on personal morals to social and political issues that I try to process and dive deeper in, trying to start conversations like personal faith and environmental threats. There are so many things that I want to communicate and converse with people about, so I start by creating something that I had been dwelling over in my head as a start. It’s never an easy battle, but once something works out and I can see it physically, I’m overjoyed and relieved.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into your story. Tell us more about your work.
I am at SCAD getting my BFA in Photography with a concentration in Fine Art Photography as well as a minor in printmaking. (And I’m almost done! One more year until I graduate!) For photography, I have been strictly working with either black and white or color film for the best couple of years and I love how I can be physically involved in making my work which also brings me to printmaking, where I can physically make work which to me, is very important and vital in my process. Also, like I mentioned before, working in the darkroom and being forced to develop my own black and white film was crucial in my photo education. The experiences I’ve had in the darkroom have ranged from absolute pure joy and singing to me crying in the corner and going back to the same print I had been trying to make for hours. I guess it’s the satisfaction I get that I know I was involved in my work that motivates me to keep going, even with mistakes or happy accidents that occur.

Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
Oh, luck. I don’t think I believe in good luck or bad luck but I believe in my process and am pretty lenient about things that happen when I’m working. I mean, I could literally be in the darkroom trying to dodge and burn one print for hours and on my last sheet of paper, get the focus wrong, and have to either give up for the day or go get more paper, but I don’t really see these types of situations as bad luck. It’s the learning curve. Nobody was perfect at something the first time they did that, and I know for a fact that I am not gonna be that person. Everything is a lesson. Everything. Every mistake, every triumph, is a lesson to me. I think young artists or anyone in their early twenties need to recognize that we are still young and learning. Mistakes will happen, some will be good, some will be bad, it’s all about how you choose to go about finding the solution to make things work, at least for me it is.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.elysabethmartin.com
• Phone: 214-606-9039
• Email: elysabethcmartin@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elysabethmartin/

Image Credit:
All photographs are by Elysabeth Martin.

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