Suzette Marie Martin is an American painter whose work is centered on the narrative potential of body language and the nude figure, within the context of conflicted human relationship to nature and to each other.

Martin’s current work explores the trauma of ecological collapse through the dichotomy of emotional experience and rational evidence. Her work incorporates theatrical gestures of distress, nature goddess mythology, scientific symbols and technical text with references to historical and contemporary events, generating narratives of spirituality and science, longing and loss in the Anthropocene. Previous series expressed the dynamics of intimacy, vulnerability, estrangement and aggression within interpersonal relationships.

Martin’s mixed media practice, rooted in drawing and developed in series, is informed by observational studies and topical research, 20th Century expressionist mark making, the history of the nude in Western art, creation and nature mythology. She uses combinations of wet and dry media to create layers of gestural and textural marks, erasures, opaque passages and washes that expose her working process of obscuring and revealing elements of figuration and abstraction.