MARTOLAO is an artist living and working in Philadelphia in both large public spaces and intimate therapeutic environments.

Drawing and painting are her best forms of communication, though she also works with fabrics, paint, writing, and poetry.

Mural painting was her first love. She uses muralism for collaborating and building support systems with other artists, and to translate shared histories into bright imagery.

She is obsessed with the Design process and meeting clients’ visions with care and intention.

Art has saved her own life many times over and she aims to share this magic wherever she goes. She collaborates with pre-teens and adults on self expression through poetry, art, and costuming in trusted community-based places.

She is a co-founder of the artist collectives Site & Story and Amber Art & Design.

ABOUT THE WORK

What death doesn’t claim for itself, our stomachs and inner systems hold onto. Our memories have bodies all their own and often grow limbs, arms, legs, and start talking back to us. My paintings, drawings, and murals contain wings, permafrost, ancient symbolism, and psychic birds that, placed side by side, converse with this chaos and give it air.

I install my work in communal spaces where I facilitate gatherings with other artists and performers, so that many interior worlds are able to dance together, the way we dance with the spirits of our pasts. Drawing is an age-old method of communication; in creating large-scale drawings, I hope to involve our own physical sense of scale and being in these spaces.

The drawings, sculptures, and wearables in my new series, there was a bear in her belly, are obsessed with explosive emotions and the ways they take over our bodies; the layering of this land’s digestion, decay, and re-creation in our bodily and material needs; the loving queerness of nature; and the many frames we had for seeing all of this prior to christian global permeations.

The drawings try to hold excess energy, permafrost, emotional outbursts, the nervous system, our animal sides, and the (simple) pain of just loving deeply. They contain layers of pencil and acrylic depicting fossilized love stories, earth rock, cortisol and cells, roots, celestial bodies, solar panels, land resembling muscle, overlapping airwaves and electric signals.

Please share your contact info for periodic studio updates, or just to reach out to me!

Please check out the people doing the work:

CADBI | Reclaim Philadelphia | Youth Art and Self Empowerment Project

and check out the makers I love and who inspire me daily