Ilyana Martinez

While creating my watercolour paintings, I see myself as a cross between an architect, a cartographer and a gardener. In an intuitive drawing process, peculiar buildings crop up in odd configurations with surrounding plants, hills and grasses. Rocks, clouds and seeds exist on equal planes. Bizarre structures are perched upon crumbling ruins, while waterways and paths leave their marks as they weave in and out of the urban diagrams. The work conjures up places of line, gesture and colour, where contrasting worlds of the urban and the natural coexist and sustain one another, to create alternate possibilities. The drawings are layered environmental maps: of the built, of the uncovered and of the imagination.