Philadelphia area artist Charlotte Lindley Martin creates intricate and colorful ceramics that respond to the natural world.  Born in Surrey, England, to an upper-class father and artist mother, her work also reflects this intersection between conventional and bohemian. Although Martin’s practice is deeply rooted in the traditions of utilitarian folk pottery, as well as the highly decorative, flower-laden porcelain vases that embellished her grandmother’s home, she is not preoccupied with the technical conventions of firing and glazing ceramics. What matters most is the viewer’s emotional connection to the work.

Martin’s influences are many—the beautiful gardens of her home country, the sturdy pottery that filled her mother’s kitchen, and the ornate Sevres and Rococo era porcelain of France. She explores the duality between the refined and the natural and states, “For me, art has always been a combination of heart and head; the wild and the cultured... I am interested in how the natural world can overwhelm and reclaim its supremacy over what is human made with all its smug superiority.”

For her exhibition at Philadelphia International Airport, the starting point for her new body of work was an extravagant piece of Sevres porcelain from the 18th century that depicts two elephant heads whose trunks transform humorously into candle nozzles. She then paired the refined outline of the archetypal vase with invasive weed motifs, and continued to let nature run riot by introducing fauna to the flora via snakes that climb across the Sevres-inspired vases. These pieces are not about orderly cultivation, but rather the abundant disorder of the organic world. In a defiant push against an increasingly technologized world, Martin declares, “Let the cultivated be reimagined through the lens of nature and let its name be Rococo Revived.”

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