Jeff Martin, Artist

Vancouver, British Columbia
Interview by Sheila Lam
Photographs by Donnel Garcia

Squirrelled away on the outer edge of Vancouver's Strathcona neighbourhood, Jeff Martin has been creating his own playground of work for nearly two decades. Inside the spacious studio, past an industrial CNC machine, a kiln room, and a six-top woodworking shop, his showroom is laden with experimental ceramic objects, an ebonized wood "sarcophagus", heavy blown glass vases, and, as of late, wood speakers he's engineered and designed himself.

Walking through his body of work, Jeff's approach is clear: make it fun and have fun making it. It's serious in scale and finish, and you can see the technical ability and craftsmanship in this ever-expanding collection, but his attitude is laid-back and unostentatious. He's someone I'd describe as salt of the earth. "The work is meant to be joyful," he says. "It should be a joy to make, and I want that to carry through so it's a joy to live with."

He has a built-in check on that instinct. "My wife isn't involved in the design industry, but she's always challenging me," he says. "When I'm going through revisions she'll say, 'that's kind of serious, you should do something more playful.'" He loves craft and counts himself among craftspeople, but he doesn't want it to become "so overwrought or so puritan". He notes Shaker-inspired pieces as a nod to a rigorous community of makers he admires, though he sees "room for improvement" and "room for fun".

The clearest expression of that spirit is his painted series, now more than a hundred credenzas strong. There's no paint involved. Jeff plays with the properties of the wood using bleaches, acids and oxides, leaving gestural marks across the surface. "I'm not a painter," he admits, which keeps it light. The work is also polarizing, and he likes it that way: "People either respond with 'I love it and I want one' or 'it's disgusting.' I don't have to try to sell anyone."

When asked how he would describe design to someone unfamiliar with the industry or his particular practice, he says, "Every single thing is designed, and there are people who do it. In interiors and furniture, it's the lived environment we construct. It's a way that we tell stories, and a way that we can hold on to stories." It's also, he adds, "a really intimate process". For his own work, he wants "a good reason for the thing to exist", often tied to the mystery of how and why we're here. Some pieces explore ancient stone-working techniques or forms with no historical record, and the sarcophagus works are deliberately oblique. "The joy isn't opening it up," he says. "It's in what you keep."

Curiosity is what moves the work along. Jeff says he simply listens for the spark. His first encounter with ceramics came around 2015, on a trip to Andalusia, Spain, with his wife and her family, when a day with a local potter led to a set of salt and pepper shakers with stoppers made from cork bark gathered on the property. A year and a half later, the idea resurfaced as cork carved, decayed and inlaid into molds, then cast in metal. The leftover cork became material for hollow plywood molds, and glass was blown into those. "I like the idea of a closed cell of a studio," he says, "where everything can be made into something else." More clay followed during Covid, first as tiles and extrusions, then as organic hanging forms. It's a material he finds elastic and earthly. "If you don't like it, you can push that body back into a block and reform it."

The speakers are the latest spark. For one client, cedar, a tonewood used in guitars, gives the cabinets a voice rather than deadening them, an attempt to bring the warmth of a wooden concert hall down to living-room scale. For another, in collaboration with Victoria's Pavilion Audio Systems, four tiles form a circular array. Baffles may be carved volcanic stone, glazed, from a craftsperson at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. The goal is that home audio shouldn't be "tragic looking". It should feel like furniture and belong in a room where people talk and listen, no screens involved.

The studio is just two people, lean by design ("What can we make with a $500 machine?" he asks), but he bands together with exceptional makers around the world, and he's learned to approach them as an amateur, asking "kind of dumb questions" like "could you do this with this?" It's a model with a long lineage. Artists have long conceived the work and leaned on specialists to realize it. Ai Weiwei famously commented that he can't make anything himself. For Sunflower Seeds, his 2010 Tate Modern installation, he enlisted some 1,600 artisans in the Chinese porcelain town of Jingdezhen to hand-paint 100 million ceramic seeds, turning a concept into a livelihood for an entire community. Fashion works in much the same way. Couture houses like Schiaparelli have relied on expert embroidery and feather ateliers since Elsa Schiaparelli herself worked with the embroiderer Albert Lesage in the 1930s, and the house's signature surrealism came to life through hands far more skilled than any one designer's. For Jeff, the best ideas happen in the space between maker and designer. As he puts it, he wants to be able to tell the story.

One practice that particularly strikes a chord is his championing of others. In 2023 he opened his studio as a gallery for artists in his network to exhibit their work, generating over $250,000 in sales for independent artists. He still makes time for emerging makers today, and his advice is consistent: "As much as you design the objects, also design the business." For Jeff, that means values you can't put a price on. The studio has planted 132 acres of forest to date, sowing far more than it has used, in the spirit of "leave it better than you found it". "If my values have a price tag," he says, "that's not what values are." ●