Taslim Martin was born in London, England to a father of Nigerian descent and a mother from St. Lucia in the Caribbean, in 1962, gaining his MA in Ceramics and Glass from London's Royal College of Art in 1998. Martin's artwork explores themes related to cultural identity, encompassing expressive figurative pieces, furniture design, and public art commissions. He often creates the same form in various materials, including paper, plaster, and terracotta, in an effort to understand their distinct characteristics.
Artist Taslim Martin was born in London, England in 1962 to a Nigerian father and a mother from St. Lucia in the Caribbean. In 1981, he earned a City and Guilds certificate in carpentry and joinery from Southend College of Art and Technology. He subsequently pursued carpentry for a decade before attending Cardiff Institute of Higher Education (1992–95) and studying Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art (1996–98). During this period, he experimented with traditional materials such as clay and plaster while also incorporating wood, metal, concrete, and terrazzo. Meeting Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, a visiting professor at the time, had a significant impact on Martin's artistic journey. He served as a model maker for Paolozzi during his MA, witnessing the complete spectrum of his practice – from studio work to grand commissions, exhibitions, and the creation of sculptures, collages, and prints. Martin also received the Sir Eduardo Paolozzi Travel Scholarship, which enabled him to visit Nigeria and study West African sculpture. While there, he interviewed artists and educators at the Universities of Benin, Lagos, and Obafemi Awolowo in Ife. He explored Benin and Yoruba sculpture traditions and was deeply influenced by Ife portrait heads in bronze and terracotta. Following two years as an artist-in-residence, Martin held his first solo exhibition at the Bracknell Gallery in South Hill Park Arts Centre in Berkshire (2000). He was subsequently artist-in-residence at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire from 2003–04.
Martin's artwork explores themes related to cultural identity, encompassing expressive figurative pieces, such as Tenderly (1999) – a female nude cast in bronze from terracotta – furniture design, and public art commissions. He often creates the same form in various materials, including paper, plaster, and terracotta, in an effort to understand their distinct characteristics. His exhibitions often feature large-scale, ghostly drawings on the walls which are created using liquid latex, with a thin layer of red clay applied to the wall afterwards. Once the latex resist is removed, the drawing is revealed as a an absence of clay on the white wall. In 2005, Martin participated in Mixed Belongings, a Crafts Council touring exhibition curated by artist and Professor Raimi Gbadamosi, featuring eight exhibitors of African descent. Among the pieces he contributed was em>Secret Dovetail (2005, British Museum), an aluminum stool inspired by both the carved wooden stools of the Ashanti and Yoruba peoples from West Africa and the high-end bodywork techniques employed by car manufacturers like Ferrari. A hidden butterfly dovetail extrusion beneath the stool secured the three pieces together, giving the work its name. Another piece, Interlocuter, comprised an interlocking tile panel made from Corian, a manmade material typically associated with Western culture. Martin noted that ‘The only African element here is the piece's name which provokes a conversation about whether or not it's African […]. And it can be heard as interlocketer which reminds people both of its form and of my mixed heritage’ (Spence 2005). In 2007, Martin designed Blue Earth 1807–2007 for the Horniman Museum, a large iron globe sculpture commemorating the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in South Africa in 2007. In 2009, the British Museum commissioned Martin to make a cast-iron portrait of Gbadamosi as part of a season dedicated to African art and culture, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of African Independence celebrations in 2010. This work is now on permanent display in the British Museum’s Africa Gallery. In 2010, Martin participated in the national crafts initiative The Shape of Things, receiving a bursary to produce artwork for his solo exhibition Disparate Nature at Touchstones, Rochdale in 2010. The show featured furniture, clay wall drawings, portraits in cast iron (including Gbadamosi), a doorstop bearing the Royal Crest, bas-reliefs that compared materials like paper and plaster and terracotta, the figure of a running woman reiterated in a number of materials, and a large abstract spiralling sculpture; as noted by Alison Britton, ‘Underpinning it all his consciousness on the indivisibility of art and design, and the intersection of Black history and British history, all of it his history’ (Disparate Nature, p. 5). Martin's solo exhibition Contemporary Primitive at the 198 Gallery, London (2007) examined the notion of objects and their historical and current roles in both African and Western societies, and aimed to provoke reflection on the interactions and mutual influences between cultures in the realm of objects.
Among other institutions, Martin has lectured at the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham (2005–06) and in the Design Museum and Kingston University (2010). His public art commissions include sculpture and public seating for Bracknell's Jubilee Garden and Icosahedra, a large-scale stainless steel sculpture at Cambourne Business Park near Cambridge (2004). Taslim Martin’s work is represented in the UK public domain in the British Museum, Touchstones Rochdale and Horniman Museum.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Taslim Martin]
Publications related to [Taslim Martin] in the Ben Uri Library