Quentin Martin
About
Quentin Martin is a British architectural designer and artist who works across a wide variety of mediums, creating work which typically broaches areas of interest which include landscape, horticulture, ecology and sustainable and ecological design. As a designer, Quentin likes to explore how various media - painting, scanning, drawing, film making and model making - can work hand in hand to be able to communicate these areas of interest. Recently, he has been exploring the ways in which human societies can build stronger relationships to more-than-human ecologies through practices such as gardening or more broadly, engaging with the worlds of soil and plants.
Quentin took his 1st year MA with ADS9, John Ng, Zsuzsa Peter and James Chung. He studied his undergraduate degree at the Architectural Association (2016 - 2019) where he also completed their Foundation Course (2015/16). Quentin has exhibited his paintings at -
The Mall Galleries / group / 2015
Messum’s Wiltshire / group / 2017
Green & Stone Gallery / group / 2020
Espacio Gallery / group / 2020
The Next Big Thing / group / 2020
The New English Art Club, The Mall Galleries / group / 2021
Hollis Mead Organic Dairy / group / 2021
The Royal Bath and West Show / group, scholar / 2021
The South West Academy, Kennaway House / group / 2021
Art For Youth UK, The Mall Galleries / group / 2021, 2022
Statement
The project explores the relationship between humans and plants and looks to understand this as having always been rooted in ideas of control. Historically, our human relationships to plants have revolved around managing varying degrees of control and order between the gardener and the plant subject. Examples which may express the least amount of control might included the neglected garden or the ancient unmanaged tree, whilst practices such as penjing, bonsai or topiary would be express the greatest degrees of control, with the formal classical gardens of the 16th and 17th century acting on similar levels of influence, just at a larger scale. In the middle, practices of maintaining trees through physical propping methods (which could be considered a form of topiary) or gardening in more naturalistic ways, present themselves as fine balances between human and plant influence.
Simultaneously, it could be argued that many of these forms of gardening, such as tending vivariums (terrariums, aquariums etc.) - which might still express high levels of management - are a form of covert gardening. One where the human impact on the plant is concealed behind a veil of the plant’s ‘natural’ habits. On the other hand, the overt gardener intentionally expresses their control and impact on the plant subject, topiary for example or tree training. This form of explicit expression may have a recent history of criticism surrounding the topic of human influence on nature, however, I would argue that the closeness and intensity of managing one’s interactions with the plant in such a way actually instills a different sense of knowledge and appreciation for the plant world. By paying very close attention to how a plant, like yew, grows and responds to human impact, high levels of respect and care can be achieved. This is possible beyond the perhaps more removed ways of gardening popular culture often employs today.
Gardening in this more overt manner not only instils more control and order on the plant, but also sometimes on ourselves, as well as enhancing respect and care for the plant, as topiary maker Darren Lerigo said about how his students feel after they have made their own individual works. They feel that making topiary gives them a greater feeling of control over their potentially disorderly lives. Similarly, the act of maintaining hyper controlled environments such as vivariums, allows others the opportunities to enhance their own management and mental health.
The etymology of the word topiary expands the definition of the word beyond shape making into the realm of place-making, since it is derived from the Greek, topos, meaning 'place'.The project looks to explore these themes and question these relationships, through an analysis and reaction to three very different forms of garden. It uses various methods of 3D scanning to reimagine the garden's representation and treats the scan itself as a form of topiary, through its various manipulations. Overt gardening involves a ping-pong philosophy; a back and forth relationship where one makes one move and the other responds. Thus the relationship between, humans, plants, control and place making is formed.
Practitioners of Gardening Control
Medium: Film, 3d scan, painting, drawing, photography
Control and the London Plane
Medium: Film, 3D Lidar Scan, Animation
Expressions of Overt Gardening
Expressions of Overt Gardening
Overt expressions of control over the plant world has had a tumultuous past and has recently fallen out of popularity in favour of more naturalistic forms of gardening. However, one could argue that through a more direct and physical interaction with the plant world, stronger relationships and respects can be formed between the human and the plant.
These overt expressions manifest themselves in a wide range of forms which could all be considered to be some form of topiary (as far as understanding it as the manipulation of a plant into a desired form).
Medium: Film, 3D Scanning, Drawing, Photography
Garden 1 - Instances of Control
Garden 1 - Instances of Control
This is my back garden. Quite similar to most London back garden typologies, in that it is a bordered enclosure, adjacent to other identically demarcated plots hosting practices of cultivation. The boundary is the first instance of spatial control in gardening. I’ve come to recognise my own relationship to plants in this space are predominantly rooted in productive control. i.e. the physical manipulation of plants for the benefit of produce and aesthetic value. For example I’ve been tying back these invasive Ailanthus trees since they were obscuring light from the beans and other plants in the garden.
The garden boundary is a layered composition of fences, plants and retaining elements. The fruit tree, a productive component of the garden, has historically been trained across similar boundaries in espaliered fashions, like this one. What if we were able to imagine the possibility of a more open garden where the boundary has become dissolved and the elements of productive and spatial control are now re-appropriated as a new composition? New relationships created which are still explicit in their use of controlling elements but more ambiguous in their dictation of how one should use the space. In this sense, the bordered place of control can become more like individual points of control, operating more as a network of dispersed locations.
Medium: Film, Animation, 3D Scanning
Garden 2 - A Covert Steward
Garden 2 - A Covert Steward
The second garden belongs to my friend Kamal Yusuf, who acts as my example of covert gardening. He uses gardening as a tool of control to add greater stability to his otherwise turbulent lifestyle.
It could be said that Kamal gardens the environment of his vivariums which subsequently controls the plant-life contained within. How would his relationship to plants change if roles were reversed and the plant were released from the boundaries of the glass tank and began to effect the new environment of the bedroom? The bedroom garden would now become the subject of Kamal’s interests, and a more direct relationship to the plant itself would have to occur. A different balance of care and control, curated and wild, would potentially foster less constrained forms of therapy for Kamal.
Medium: Film, Animation, 3D Scanning, Drawing
Garden 3 - A Changing Spectacle
Garden 3 - A Changing Spectacle
The final example is more an approach to gardening, and involves a topiarist called Darren Lerigo. Our conversations, among other things, were centred around the social aspect of making topiary, In that there is a joy in the discussion between the gardener and plant life.
Darren’s topiary is contained within a back garden however, I speculate that by placing a topiary, with all its surreal potential for shape-shifting, in the midst of an urban environment, new ways of reading the city could happen. As eluded to before, topiary has a magnetic effect of bringing people together around one social spectacle. Both the bizarreness of its form and ritualistic maintenance, along with being located in a place perhaps where it shouldn’t be, can potentially have positive consequences on how we chose to read the city and our collective relationship to plants. The spectacle of one public facing topiary, set free from its usual locations in prescribed spaces for flora, could behave as an alternative social epicentre whilst making dramatic spatial interventions.
Medium: Film, Animation, 3D Scanning