Artist: Martha Tuttle

Timothy Taylor presents Fields and Hedges, an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Martha Tuttle.This marks the artist’s debut presentation with the gallery and features materially rich abstractions that trace the intimate dialogue between landscape and body.

Created during a residency in Somerset this past summer, this series was conceived and completed within the same terrain that inspired them. Along the region’s walking paths and open fields, Tuttle was inspired by the objects she observed and created sketches that would later inform her subtle compositions—quiet, tactile works that merge elements of painting, sculpture, and textile. Tuttle’s process foregrounds the natural qualities of her chosen materials as well as embodies experiences of production. She sews together fragments of hand-spun and boiled wool with linen and silk, each coloured with hand-ground mineral pigments and plant dyes. These textiles are then stretched over bars proportioned to the scale of the artist’s own head and torso. Marking a development in her practice, this series reflects Tuttle’s heightened integration of the body within the materiality of her paintings. She designed and made clothes that she wore during her outings, later using the natural residue of her body’s mineral output—sweat—as a mordant to bind pigment to the textile. These traces are then carried onto the surfaces of her works, transforming process into image. The resulting chance-based marks read as pure abstractions, yet each is an index of the artist’s physical presence and sustained efforts.

Tuttle created objects inspired by these materials, including ceramics based on drawings from Somerset, stones, glass beads and other glass forms, cast metal elements, earth, gemstones, and carved alabaster, which she then positioned atop her paintings to engage in dialogue with the forms and hues therein. Each composition originates from drawings and sketches of the landscape, which Tuttle refines across media—from tracing paper to digital studies—until she arrives at the formal relationships that appear in her paintings. Her paintings evoke both the legacy of geometric abstraction and various natural elements and events: clouds drifting over water, wind moving through grasses, seedpods, lichen on stone. Because of their molecular structure, the mineral pigments and dyes Tuttle employs reflect light irregularly, unlike the consistent structure of synthetic colours. This quality results in dynamic plays of transparency and opacity, surface, and depth.

Two diptychs, What turns up in the meadow and Falcon Day for Rocky (all works 2025)—irregular umber, stone, and mauve-hued patchworks that recall fields viewed from a bird’s eye—emphasise the artist’s interest in expanding the space of the work to involve its many perceived dimensions, as well as the shadow and light it engages. In each, the two surfaces create a tension that activates the wall between and beyond them, calling attention to questions of context, environment, and support. This ultimately reflects the ecological concern that is at the core of Tuttle’s work; with her material and formal experimentation, she seeks to convey the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman entities. Her paintings, she explains, gesture to “a way that art can help facilitate a language of sharedness.”