Martina Celerin

Martina Celerin is a Bloomington, Indiana resident with a long and unusual path to her current art career. She was born in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic, and immigrated to Canada as a young girl. After earning a doctoral degree in Plant science from the University of Western Ontario, she accepted a postdoctoral position as a molecular geneticist in the biology department at Indiana University. During that time, she met and married her husband and together they have to delightful sons, Tommie and Jacob.

In 2002, Martina decided to transition from science back to her roots as an artist.  In the past, she focused on oil pastels and acrylic painting.  Experimentation with each of these has been useful for her current medium of choice, fiber. Martina’s work with oil pastels forced her to focus on visual mixing of color and the powerful interplay of colors when they are placed proximally compared to when they are physically distant. Acrylic painting allowed for quick mixing of colors but she became dissatisfied with the flatness of the art. She begin gluing found objects onto the canvas and then painting over them. This was better, but still not enough. Eventually she realized that she needed to create her own canvas. Weaving allows Martina to incorporate objects, textures and shapes as well as colors and coarseness into the canvas.  Combining this with needle felting, wrapping and crochet, she’s been able to push the dimensional limits of wall art and create weaving-felting fusions that are three dimensional tapestries.