BIO

For over 25 years Martha Fuller has exhibited her fine art photography nationally at galleries and museums, as well as libraries and international airports. Her one-of-a kind multiple image pieces and Artist Books defy conventions of photography, blending poetic and painterly skills with an eye for the unpredictable. Inspired by global travel, film, literature and the ineffable, her work synthesizes the romantic and the raw.

Drawing on dual Master’s degrees in Fine Art (Creative Photography) and English, Fuller develops and teaches courses and workshops in Visual Arts, Photography, Alternative Processes, Art History, Artist Books, Creative Writing, and Literature at art schools, universities, colleges, museums and private venues in Southern California.

As creative consultant at Martha’s Muse, Fuller coaches, instructs, and inspires emerging and established artists, as well as aspiring and published authors, transforming ideas and experience into image and word. As artist, writer, and muse, she maintains her blog, contributes images, print and on line articles, and consults on individual projects.

Born in Canada, Fuller lives and works in Laguna Beach, California.

STATEMENT

Compelled by an impulse to discover, I engage chance and circumstance— the undercover and the overlooked. With the curiosity of an anthropologist and the sensibility of a filmmaker, I’m rarely satisfied with a single photograph. Rather than a desire to capture a particular moment, I seek to expand time and shrink distance.  I combine, layer and juxtapose images taken out of context to excavate and reinvent the missing pieces. On occasion, I rephotograph projections to allow what I haven’t yet seen to show through. Like the cinema of memory, I practice alchemy.

 

An insatiable wanderer, my ribbon of travels zigzags from the currents of the Amazon to the ghats on the Ganges, the highlands of Papua New Guinea to remote villages in West Africa, the points of the Golden Triangle in Thailand, Myanmar and Laos, to the wilds of Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa – from a kaleidoscope of countries in Europe to the ancient ideals of Japan, the peaks of the Himalayas in Nepal and Pakistan to the textures of Mexico—the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee—Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Fiji—and all the Caribbean Islands in the path of hurricanes from Cuba to Grenada.

 

Guided by my subconscious and the rhythms of nature, I gravitate towards the unknown—to organic encounters, the beauty of the damaged, the damage of the beautiful, the mystery of survival and the echoes of the lost. Only later, my conscious mind reveals connections—a splice of the visual and conceptual. When I’m not traveling, and sometimes when I am, I turn the camera on myself or ask a soul mate or a stranger to envision me.

 

On a relentless quest for answers—I question. I investigate and contemplate. Truth and beauty mingle in the fusion of illusion and reality. In the spirit of transformation.