Artist weaves life into her work

In a way, local artist Martina Celerin has been an artist all her life. She admits she has been creating things since she was a child, but after her life chose other paths, she found her way back to art and now wants to get the community involved in the world of art.\nShe will begin a community tree project starting at this year’s Fourth Street Festival with local limestone sculptor Amy Brier. The two artists will create a four-foot-tall tree that will be placed along Bloomington’s B-Line Trail. \nAfter Brier carves a trunk from limestone, Celerin will add wire branches wrapped in yarn to the top of the tree trunk. After that is done, she will take material from the recycling center to create 900 oversized elm leaves, which children at the festival will be encouraged to decorate and tie onto the tree. \nCelerin has no formal training in weaving; she is self-taught and admits that having a Ph.D. taught her to teach herself. She has taken on the world of weaving, creating three-dimensional tapestries that literally jump off the woven canvas. For her weavings, she pulls together mostly recycled materials from people’s leftover knitting projects, the sidewalk exchange at the recycle center and the local weaver’s guild, to name a few. She also incorporates a lot of objects she has found into her pieces whether they are natural or unnatural; even rocks with holes in them are prized objects in her house, Celerin said.\nWhen it comes to creating her tapestries, each piece is different. The completion time of each work depends on the piece itself and so do the elements incorporated into it. \n“Sometimes it’s the yarn (that) inspires the piece and it’s sometimes the piece (that) dictates what kind of yarn or materials I use on the piece,” Celerin said. \nFor inspiration, she looks to her life and brings special moments and memories to her pieces. \n“When people see weavings that I’ve done of scenes, they often ask where is that and most of the scenes are composites of a lot of places I’ve been and I’ve seen,” she said. \nFor instance, a piece called “A Road to the Barn,” is inspired by the times Celerin’s eldest son wouldn’t take naps as a baby, and she would load him in the car and drive along country roads to lull him to sleep.\nIn high school, Celerin had the first taste of her current art form: weaving. She said that one of her “forward-thinking” teachers introduced her to the idea of tapestry weaving. \n“That’s sort of where I got the absolute basic techniques, but I’ve taken that and really pushed the boundaries and created what I think is a really different art form beyond the classical tapestry techniques in my 3-dimensional stuff,” Celerin said.\nOriginally from Prague, Celerin and her family left her home country as refugees for Ontario, Canada where she attended high school.\nAfter high school, her life turned in a different direction, leaving art on the side for science. She earned her Ph.D. in plant sciences from the University of Western Ontario and soon there came to IU for a postdoctoral position in the Department of Biology as a molecular geneticist. Celerin said she has always been doing art on the side, but for a majority of the time, science was her main focus.\nIt was here at IU where she met her husband and began to come back to her roots as an artist. After having two sons, her passion for art came back into the forefront of her life. \n“I can remember perfectly sitting on the floor in the kitchen as I was drawing with crayons with Tommie and nursing Cubbie and saying to my husband, ‘you know I really want to get back into art,’” Celerin said, “and so he had just gotten tenure in the biology department and so we had some stability and he said, ‘well let’s go for it.’” \nCelerin hopes to get the local community involved with the creation of art, something she believes to be truly important in understanding art in the first place. \n“Little pieces make up the whole and that’s really what art is in so many ways,” Celerin said.