Marta is a gentle spirit. She’s both intuitive and razor-sharp. She grew up in the world of art thanks to an artist mother and thanks to her mother’s friends from all over Europe. Although Marta was born in Amsterdam she was brought up and educated in the United States. She lived in a suburb of a city in Connecticut, where everything was all very neat and tidy, where no one strayed from the norm and where she and her mother always felt a little out of place. This is why Marta, as an only child, grew up surrounded by a circle of European writer and artist friends who often came to pay them visits or who they visited, on their many trips overseas.

“Vaclav Havel and my mother were part of the same crowd when she was growing up, and I often heard stories about him and his efforts of resistance. The son of Alphonse Mucha was my mother’s dearest friend in Prague, and we visited his home near Prague Castle, which was like a perfectly preserved time capsule from the Belle Époque. It was all red and gold with velvet and animal furs and peacock feathers, elaborate furniture and smoke-filled air. All of my parents’ friends were connected somehow to art or literature or politics in some way. This was also true of our visits to Amsterdam. There were poets, singers, gallerists and artists and art dealers, actors, models, photographers…I suppose I grew up with art and culture as the centrepiece of our lives. It wasn’t until I was a bit older that I realised first and foremost how lucky and unique my experience was, but also how much it mapped out my understanding of the world.”

On her travels, Marta visited exhibitions, museums, and opera theatres. She has frequented the creative world since time immemorial. When I asked her when she recalled having undertaken her first artistic experiments, she told me: “Since the very beginning. I have always worked with my mother in her workshop, making my own contribution, too.” Her mother has tried her hand in several creative environments – from portraiture to areas that have been more closely bound to the natural environment. Even her grandmother on her mother’s side wanted to pursue a creative career, in porcelain, but she had been compelled to embark upon a career as a secretary, considered to be the highest form of professional opportunity available to her. Signs of those times. Her revenge however came to be through her daughter and granddaughter, Marta. Generations of creative women.

In the beginning Marta Abbott didn’t think that she would be following in the steps of her mother. Or rather, she felt held back, not ready yet to express herself in a creative way. However, she did feel that that was the world to which she was destined. Marta has studied Studio Arts, English Literature, Art Restoration (Paintings and Frescoes). She has worked in art galleries and with jewellery designers in New York. A turning point came about when, just before her thirtieth birthday, Marta was forced to stay in bed for over six months due to some operations that she had had to undergo. Every day that she spent in bed, she gave herself the task of finding something that would succeed in expressing the idea of beauty. That was how her vision of the world came to be transformed. Each and every day, she experimented with new techniques. She carried our research and, also thanks to Instagram, that had just started, she began by publishing those experiments.

“At that point, I thought that life was sending me a message. That I had to go back to what I was really feeling inside of me. That the time had come for me to take the plunge. The time had arrived to try and start my evolution as an artist – a 100% artist. And that is what I have been doing since then. I turned a highly difficult moment into a moment of reflection in order to chase and to pander to my deepest needs.”

Marta Abbott knew that she wanted to live in Europe. She felt more at home there. On this side of the ocean. So she evaluated the possibility of Amsterdam, Prague and Italy, too. And Italy was the final choice. Marta has had several artistic residences; in Florence, Pantelleria and Rome where she has been living now for ten years with her little boy Oliver who, ever since he was a little baby, has been accompanying his mother to art fairs and exhibitions. He has worked with his mother with flowers as Marta also used to do with her own mother. Since 2017 Marta has exhibited in the United States, in the Czech Republic and in Italy. Her work has been described in a variety of publications and it has also been presented in the book, Make Ink (Abrams Press) by Jason Logan of the Toronto Ink Company. Marta was one of the three finalists in the 2022 edition of the Premio Cramum Award, and she has appeared in The Colour of Ink, a documentary presented at the Toronto International Film Festival on the history of ink.

Marta’s work is constantly evolving. She uses inter-disciplinary materials and means of expression but at the current moment she only prefers natural inks and pigments which she herself extracts from indoors and outdoors – with unexpected results.

“Ink is a manifestation of our desire to express what is inside us and if you study its history, it links all parts of the world, of civilisation…it is a part of art, design, fashion, music, literature and on and on. And every time I make a new batch of ink, I am reminded of all of this. That, and the beautiful alchemy of it, of the transforming of one material into another”.

Marta would like to enable her art to become part of an attentive investigation into – and observation of – the microcosm and the macrocosm. An artist delves into the beauty of both worlds. An artist seeks to seize those details that are usually neglected and so invite people to dwell a little longer on them, to gaze longer at them.

“People often say my work feels delicate or even peaceful, but the materials I use, such as plants, flowers, and colours from the ground, are ones that have survived time and the elements and many an actual storm.”

“I like the idea of quietly showing the strength in what appears to be fragile.”

Among the subjects that Marta examines in her art, one of the ones that she feels closer to is the connection between the Sky and the Earth, the concept of Axis Mundi. What the artist finds fascinating are those places of passage between the celestial and earthly worlds, previously analysed by both myth as well as by a host of religions. We might also consider ourselves to be a channel and by means of our imagination we are able to perceive other worlds and to connect with them in an almost alchemic process.

A series that Marta has created and which examines this theme is Stargazers. Over a year she has gathered flowers, leaves, and pieces of varying vegetation at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. She has extracted the inks for her works from these elements. Works that portray the details of the headstones, the lichen that grows out of them and the night sky that all of us can see. For this series, Marta has also been inspired by literature and in particular by John Keats’ Endymion, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, To A Star.

“All matter on Earth is said to originate from stardust. The series Stargazers was created with the thought that all those who are laid to rest in the ground are forever gazing upwards, towards the stars.”

As a matter of fact, Marta is also fascinated by the world at night, by the constellations and by those celestial maps that attempted to bestow some sort of idea of order into the chaos of the cosmos. Her Book of Night Skies is the result of this fascination. This book – of night scenes, of little odes to the beauty of the many forms of the heavenly bodies and the spaces within which they exist – has been made by using natural inks on the pages of a watercolour book. The book is the fruit of the artist’s imagination, and, in part, it is also inspired by real images from the outside world. Fragments of the universe.

Marta also treats with the same amount of delicacy the subject of Light; above all that light which is connected to the world of flowers. Indeed, when she tries to find a definition for her series Bearer of Light,she claims that:

“Every flower might be considered to be like a little torch, a provider of light that aids in illuminating those spaces that we do not normally see.”

Marta has also examined the connection between Water and Earth in her series Block Island Seaweed Studies and she has also undertaken an interesting series on marble called Pietra Viva, in which she utilises – to the utmost – marble powder as her main artistic tool. During her artistic residence at the Fondazione Bisonte in Florence, after having stood in admiration beneath the night sky in a marble quarry in Carrara, Jason Logan, of the Toronto Ink Company asked her to collect the marble powder that Marta would later treat with different techniques with the aid of the Foundation.

“Flesh, marble, flower, Venus, it’s you I believe in!
Chair, marbre, fleur, Venus, c’est en toi que je crois!”

 Arthur Rimbaud

I would like to invite you, dear reader, to look deeper into the work of Marta Abbott. She is striving to crystallise time, intercept those myriad refractions of light and grasp the voices of those spirits suspended between the earthly and the celestial worlds. She is seeking to sense the flows of transformation and of decay through research, spontaneity, and improvisation.