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Shantell Martin

Starting with the humble tools of pen and paper she creates delicate, intricate and ever changing otherworldly scenes, of populated quasi-humans and other not-quite-familiar creatures, which themselves seem to be continually engaged in the process of evolving into something else. Of her drawings she says:

“The lines are spontaneous and intuitive, drawing for me is a line that flows between the past and the future without touching the sides.”

Her illustrations are unique and flexible, a style that has proved adaptable to other forms of expression. Apart from her drawings, which have been exhibited from London to Tokyo, as an increasingly-sought after VJ Shantell has created two unique art forms—both proudly low-tech—which allow her to bring her work to a wider, club-going audience. One, which she calls PPP (pen, paper, projector) and does regularly at an experimental mixed-media collaboration called Test Tone at Super Deluxe in Tokyo’s Nishi-Azabu, involves her covering the walls with an interconnected veil of hallucinatory lines and images to sounds of an eclectic mix of live performances. She sees herself as
providing a “visual connection between the audience and the performers”.

For the slightly more hi-tech Sketch Projection, she uses a Wacom tablet (kind of like a grown-up, electronic version of Etch-a-Sketch) and one or more projectors to draw and erase, with the use of negative space and audience interaction playing an important part in the creation of the images.