Melanie Martinez is a multi-media based artist, her weavings engages sensory experiences, coping strategies, connection, and emphasizes touch. The practice of weaving began as a coping strategy. Carrying on a matrilineal tradition in handicraft is a foundational component of her current practice. Materiality through craft is foundationally rooted in childhood. Embroidery, hemming, collage, and sewing, are just a few at-home creative techniques she watched and learned from her mother and grandmother. The lineage of women doing this intricate labor extends far beyond them. So her prior experience with hand-sewing and embroidery felt like a natural progression to learn weaving. The warp and the loom dictate the boundaries within which she can play, simultaneously combining intuition and rationale for creative decision making. With a sensitivity to how materials feel, she finds textures and patterns in the natural world, pulling from forests, overgrown backyards, desert sunsets, or capsizing waves, and synthesizes them into a final tactile piece. Her weavings display imaginary and abstracted landscapes of color and textures. She evokes complex ecologies with a sense of grounding. Brining motifs from the outside to the inside, as she turns inward to create a conceptual space of cathartic healing.

Her prior work as a figurative painter peeked into private moments to peel back the vulnerability within shared bedroom conversations, embrace, uneasiness, and pondering. Her fascination with the high emotional complexity of physical presence, anchored in time and space, through its emotions and energy. Her artwork’s materiality evokes touch, softness, and spatiality through pastel, charcoal, thread, acrylic, and gouache paint. While creating, she is conscious of her body's closeness with the materials and surface as she moves and presses her weight into the forms. The completed pieces are intimate in size and draw the viewer in closely, coming as close as Melanie does while she engages with them during their fruition. 

Born in Fort Irwin, California. She attended Texas Tech University to obtain her BFA with an emphasis in painting. Currently, she is attending Portland State University for her MFA through the Studio Practice Program.