About Martha Cole
Martha Cole was born in 1946, in Regina, Saskatchewan. Right now she lives in Disley, SK in their abandoned church. Martha focuses mainly on using fabrics with her art. Her main inspirations for her art come from nature, community, and spirituality. Martha had decided that she wanted to become an artist by the age of 14, and went into the fine arts in sculptures. She had started making by making giant sculptures using metals and welding them together. When she realised that the projects would be too expensive, and too large scaled for her apartment, she decided that fabrics would be smaller and cheaper.
About Her Art
When Martha works on her art, she starts with an image, whether it be visual or inside her head. Martha is quite a visual person, and can see the art she is trying to do in her head. Her art also has a lot of detail that you might not be able to see from just the image. Lately, she has also been trying to keep with the nature of the trees and flowers in her work to try and keep it as realistic as possible.
Recent Work
In Martha's most recent work, she had finished this picture to the right a day before her show in 2016. It started with her grandmother (who has the same name as her.) who was turning it into a quilt. Then her mother (Hermina Cole) filled in the large missing patches. Then Martha took the project over and turned it into her own art with the stitching and fine painting. She had hand-cut out all of the pieces of the flower, used thin fabrics so it can show some of the colours through the flower, and she finely painted the center of the flower to add more detail that is hard to see from a distance. Martha had said that it was a more difficult piece that she has worked on, but she loves the challenge.