Cloaked
Oil on custom red oak ply support, liquid iron, instant rust, 84 × 24 × 13 cm, 2025
 
Artwork Statement
Cloaked is a three-dimensional painting installed across a corner space — an area typically overlooked or marginalised. By occupying this architectural threshold, the work reflects on how artistic practice is often pushed to the edges of contemporary life, positioned as secondary within systems driven by productivity and efficiency.
The work engages with Distributed Worlds through the uneven allocation of space, visibility, and value. By reclaiming the corner as a site of presence rather than absence, I explore how constrained environments can be reimagined as spaces of possibility. This gesture parallels my ongoing exploration of invisible illness, where lived experience often exists outside dominant systems of recognition.
Materially, the drapery references a bedsheet, drawn from personal experiences of being bedbound, while rusted metal elements evoke the intersections between physical and digital worlds. Together, these elements construct a layered language through which absence, embodiment, and resilience can be held and made visible.
 
Artist Bio
Alice Marie Martin is a multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne whose practice explores the lived experience of invisible and chronic illness through poetic visual narratives and self-portraiture. Working primarily in oil painting alongside experimental installation and material processes, her work investigates identity, embodiment, and natural symbolism, building an introspective dialogue around often underrepresented experiences of chronic illness.