Our next featured artist invites us to explore a part of the world we rarely see, yet is all around us.
Where Art Meets Experiment
Kit Martin is a fine art photographer based in Newport-on-Tay, Fife, whose work explores identity, perception, and the tension between control and chance. With a background in science, Kit brings an experimental edge to their photography, often using alternative processes and chemical manipulation to create images that blur the line between art and alchemy.
Their recent work embraces imperfection, inviting accidents and organic transformations into the creative process. Each piece becomes a meditation on time, memory, and materiality.
Kit has exhibited widely and was recently selected for the Experimental Photography Festival in Barcelona (2024) and a residency at Island Darkroom on the Isle of Lewis (2022). Their work challenges viewers to reconsider the nature of photography itself—not just as representation, but as process.
Kit’s lens is curious, reflective, and quietly radical—capturing what lies beyond the surface.
Kit is a photographic artist who enjoys the physical tangibility of analogue and cameraless photography as well as digital. The natural world is her constant inspiration and she celebrates the tiny things. Interested in the crossover of art and science.
1 - Could you explain your practice? Only you know why you do what you do.
My photography career began with medical and police photography before leaving this to study and then work in environmental management. 9 years ago, I found my way into more creative freelance photography and have slowly built my practice.
Having looked closely at the natural world through macro photography for years, I have been exploring photography with microscopes during my recent MFA in Art, Science & Visual Thinking. Mosses and the microorganisms living in and amongst these small but mighty plants, along with soil organisms, are part of my current research and exploration, and I’m working with scientists on the soil project. I’m an experimental photographic artist who enjoys making images as much as taking them. I work with cameraless historical processes such as cyanotype, lumens, and photograms as well as film and digital photography. I now also work with printmaking, moving images, glass, and sound to investigate and try to understand the world around me. It all centres around a deep love of the natural world and a desire to encourage others to look closely and notice things, particularly things that get less attention.
I teach cyanotype, argyrotype, and pinhole photography in collaboration with charities, museums, festivals, and arts centres including Dundee Contemporary Arts Print Studio.
2 - Is art relevant today?
Yes, thank goodness. Art is essential to trying to make sense of the world and for humans to communicate. It can be an insightful portal to the past or make us catch our breath at a fellow human's sheer talent and skill. It can tackle difficult and uncomfortable subjects with humour and grace or hit us straight on and leave us reeling.
3 – We are always asked what other artists influence us. We want to know what art you don’t like and which influences you.
I can have a strong reaction to art that I don’t like. This can be for various reasons, and I can appreciate the work involved without liking it. I’d rather see work I don’t like and have a reaction than work that leaves me cold. Photorealistic painting and ‘stunning’ digital photography that is oversaturated and overworked can leave me cold.
I am influenced by a whole range of things, from 17th century Dutch art Rachel Ruysch, Maria Merian, Melchior d’Hondecoeter), to the photographic pioneers (Anna Atkins, Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron), to the Sustainable Darkroom artist experimenters, Hannah Fletcher, Ed Carr, Alice Cazenave, Scott Hunter, Almudena Romero). I am influenced too by reading Robin Wall Kimmerer, George Monbiot, Amanda Thompson, and Ursula Le Guin, and constantly by my creative friends and colleagues and, while doing my MFA recently, artist-lecturers.
4- If you could go back 10-20 years, what would you tell your younger self?
10 years back, I’d say keep going, as I was beginning my journey towards being a freelance artist. I’d also tell myself that it’s not depression; It’s peri-menopause!
If it were 20 years, I’d tell myself that my twins were going to be just fine. They were one then and had been born very prematurely. I’d be very surprised to hear from my future self that I would one day be a practising artist!
5 – If you could go forward 10-20 years what do you hope to have done or not done?
I hope in 10 and 20 years to still be enjoying my work and still to be curious. I’d love to keep building on my work in the art-science intersection and see where that takes me. I realise my privilege in working full time as a photographic artist and, having come to it later in life, makes me want to make the most of it.
Contact Kit here.
website https://kitmartinphoto.co.uk/about-2/
social media @kitmartinphoto