Emily A. Martinez

Architect || Artist

I began drawing the rocks by rubbing conté over French mold pressed papers as Seurat did. I studied the stones individually and collectively. I’d carefully select which rocks would pose for me and compose their light and shadows as carefully as I would draw them.

While drawing the rocks, I was deep in the research phase of my thesis year at Cooper Union. I set out to investigate all facets of the U.S.-Mexico border from its earliest marking to its contemporary politics. I examined the geography along the entire span and its relationship to different constructions of the border wall and ports of entry. I was also reading a heavy dose of Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” She explains the importance of re-creating images in order to deconstruct history and its false mythologies as a means to construct a new reality.

The architectural aspect of my psyche needed raw geometric data about the landscape in order to proceed with design. Digital modeling became essential in helping to understand the ground conditions.

I remember thinking through the sense of touch, picking the rocks up and rotating them over and over in my fingers while my eyes would inscribe like lasers where I wanted to cut them. With the other hand, I would draw the contours of what I felt. I tried casting them in plaster, sculpting them from clay and slicing them literally. I once submerged them in a bed of flour and photographed the reveal. None of these methods matched the level of precision I was after. I even contemplated having the collection scanned through an MRI machine for the planar and cross sectional data. Eventually, I allowed myself to let go and just drew what I imagined their cuts to look like. That procedure left me architecturally unsatisfied, but artistically surprised.

Looking back at the painful AutoCad drawings and botched 3D models, I sense great dissatisfaction. It wasn’t until I finished the year that I began to imagine photography as the catalyst towards digital replication. The process I discovered is known as photogrammetric modeling. By rotating an object on a surface using calibration markers at even 360 degree intervals at different elevations you obtain enough data to automate a pretty accurate 3D mesh. This technique also offers the texture bitmaps needed for rendering the mesh in outside 3D platforms.

The rocks’ texture is rolled out onto a flat surface and splayed as though the rock was tumbled face by face over a flatbed scanner. The tumbling has its own logic and flows onto the mesh quite accurately. I am studying the logic of this tumble by color coding different regions of the map. This allows me to hypothesize about how to further refine the photographic process.

The mesh objects and their textures are essential for limitless spatial orientation on semi-abstracted landscapes. I can now light them with the sun of any day, past or future. My fascination with the sun came during my first year at Cooper where I learned how to geometrically construct and render specific shadow angles by hand, using astronomical data about the azimuth and altitude of the sun from the U.S. Naval Observatory. I have always been observant about the light that hits places and have long desired to produce site-specific works about the spirit of places and their people.

I work as an architectural designer at a small studio in TriBeCa. My responsibilities include focused research and architectural design, from early schematics through construction. I am currently working on a project on the Mediterranean Coast. What I do for a living and what I do in my spare time are worlds apart.

I moved to New York in 2005 with $400 to my name, to pursue the kind of education that would ensure that I would land a good job. The struggle to educate myself and make a home here took all I had to give. My educational years were all about self-development and exploration, whereas the years after have felt like the complete unraveling of my personal creative spirit.

I am a non-conformist living in a suffocating sphere of high expenses and high expectations. I never knew how non-conformist I really was until I was tied down to someone else’s desk for a steady paycheck, excellent healthcare benefits and a 401(k). There are certain highs I feel when I’ve reached an epiphany or major breakthrough in my personal work, which I know is worth more than money. I have bent my soul in half for this double life and every day I wonder if this is honestly the best I can do, or whether there are other sustainable alternatives that I’m failing to imagine.

After work and on the weekends, I turn into a hermit. Socializing often feels wrong when my highest priority these days is to focus on my work and to listen carefully to myself. My goals are crystallizing and my direction is narrowing.

My studio is in my bedroom or my bedroom is in my studio, I can’t tell. Every square inch is tightly negotiated to accommodate my programmatic requirements. Recently, I have been experimenting so rigorously that I decided to rip my closet door off the hinges for 15-square-feet of extra space. Along one wall, I have a wooden shelf where I keep a collection of 22 natural geological rocks, arrowheads and what I suspect are Native American hand tools. These objects were found scattered in the dry soils of my native land - the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. I obtained these formations from my grandmother’s rock and arrowhead archive.

As a kid, I would spend long summers on the border with her and my grandfather. Those were the times before computers and the internet were appropriated for casual use. I remember reading books cover to cover from the 1960s Childcraft series, watching nature programs while learning how to embroider and looking at lots of interesting rocks. I would speculate openly on how I imagined they came to be the way they are. I borrowed 22 from the collection and have spent years analyzing them.

With the tools architects use to represent ideas for intended constructions, I explore landscape, sculpture and drawing. In my other eight hours; I am drawing, digitally replicating rocks, mapping drawings onto forms, learning photographic techniques, writing, reading, sculpting, geo-terrain modeling, mapping time on places and imagining a new way of living for my work.