Martha Fleming


Martha Fleming is a Canadian-born interdisciplinary artist, editor, publisher, and academic. Her work encompasses several areas of discipline, combining research with the development of interdisciplinary creative capacities in areas of history, science, technology, design, and fine arts. She currently resides in the United Kingdom.

Education

Fleming was born in 1958 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She lived and worked in Montreal, Quebec, until 1995, when she moved to London, England, to pursue a M.A from the University of London in The History of the Book. Fleming later received her PhD, titled From Le Musee des Sciences to the Sciences Museum: Fifteen Years of Evolving Methodologies in the Art and Science Interface from the School of Art, Architecture and Design of Leeds Metropolitan University.

Early career

In her early artistic career, Fleming was an involved in various artist-run centres, and was an editor and publisher for art publications such as ArtForum, Open Letter, and Block, among others.

Collaboration with Lyne Lapointe

In 1981, Fleming established both a romantic and collaborative relationship with French-Canadian artist Lyne Lapointe. The couple lived together in Montreal, Quebec, where they produced a large body of works that critiqued systemic oppressions and gallery or museum practices through a feminist lens. This includes a number of works that integrate themes of feminine sexuality, science, and botany, with drawing, sculpture, found-objects, and installation. Fleming and Lapointe are widely known however for their research-focused and site-specific projects, held at various abandoned and charged architectural spaces across Montreal, Quebec, New York City, New York, and São Paulo, Brazil. La Donna Deliquenta refers to Cesare Lombroso's 1893 book, The Female Offender, an early criminological text that connected prostitutes, immigrants and poor people in order for police to identify prospective criminals. Engaging such sites with feminist concerns, marginalization, and gallery and museum practices, Fleming and Lapointe addressed complex social issues historically embedded at such sites. This focus of work was furthermore intended to "bite the hand that wouldn’t feed them."
Eat Me/Drink Me/Love Me, 1989
In December 1989, Fleming and Lapointe held their first collaborative exhibition in a museum setting, titled, Eat Me/Drink Me/Love Me, at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. The title and exhibition is a response to poet Christina Rosetti’s 19th century allegorical poem "Goblin Market", which explores themes of feminine temptation, redemption, and conflicts between virtue and sensual pleasure, in a pastoral setting. Eat Me/Drink Me/Love Me, transformed the Museum’s gallery in to a space of a domestic yet nature-rooted environment, with found objects, materials from the natural world, and other architectural elements. Together, these elements transfused the themes of emotional and sexual possibilities or restrictions for women, including a personal homoerotic twist, inspired from "Goblin Market."
Studiolo, 1995-1997
At the end of their 15-year relationship in 1995, Fleming and Lapointe had a retrospective, titled Studiolo, incorporating the bulk of research, processes, and discursive and creative projects that they shared. The show was exhibited at the Museum d’Art Contemporain in 1997, and later at the Art Gallery of Windsor 1998 invited by curator at the time, Helga Pakasaar. Accompanied with the exhibition was an associated book, also titled Studiolo. The book showcases the philosophical, historical, and aesthetic frameworks associated to the exhibition, and is located in Artextes Editions of 1997.
Other Collaborative works include:
In 1995, Fleming moved to London, England. While her formative years collaborating with Lapointe still greatly influenced her later work, her relocation to the UK immersed her practice further into interdisciplinary research fields, as she participated extensively in research projects and professorship at several major institutions.
Atomism and Antomism
Held at the Science Museum of London, England, Fleming’s exhibition Atomism and Antomism is an amalgamation of scientific objects of the Cartesian Enlightenment period, distributed in juxtaposing displays across the museum. In a similar light to the collaborative installation La Musee de Sciences with Lapointe in 1984, the displays created a reflective and critical response to museum practices which reestablished new and multiple orderings of scientific tropes and meanings.
Other exhibition-oriented project-collaborations include Split + Splice at the Medical Museion of the University of Copenhagen ; Thinking Through Objects, at the Deutsches Museum in Munich ; and You are Here: The Design of Information, at the Design Museum in London.
Research and Teaching
Fleming has furthermore lectured, edited, and published in various contexts, including that of lectureships, scholarly journals, and art journals. Since the beginning of 2000s, Fleming has been the recipient of several grants, and has been involved in several major interdisciplinary research projects, including, amongst several: