Simon Martin is an artist living and working in London whose work explores ideas of subjectivity and the built environment. During his Stanley Picker Fellowship Martin aims to undertake an area of research around Objecthood, sound and memory.

Martin has previously made videos and exhibitions looking at how we might experience a range of cultural artefacts including buildings, images, artworks and furniture, reflecting on how the codes and commands of such artefacts press into our consciousness and play with memory. Recently he has said ‘I have moved from looking at particular objects and thinking about them in social terms to looking at how object image and place coalesce and seep into us in more indirect ways’.

Working with sound is an attempt to engage more directly with the modalities of production and distribution in contemporary art and technology. This together with a deeper investment in the possibilities of aural culture has been the main focus of his recent attention. Reflecting on the Internet Martin asks ‘Where does this vast accumulation and super fluidity of instantly callable images together with their simple replaceability leave us in terms of production as artists? What does it do to knowledge? What form of productivity effectively sidesteps this machinery without losing essential drives?’ Sound, proposes Martin, offers one possible way forward.

Martin will develop a new body of work for the Stanley Picker Fellowship built from the sonic ghosts offered up by the recent past, the city and our technological selves.

Martin has had numerous exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Camden Arts Centre, Chisenhale Gallery, Tate Britain, White Columns, New York and Bass Museum of Art, Miami.