Welcome to the 349th installment of A View From the Easel, the series in which artists reflect on their workspaces. This week, Lilit Martirosyan traces the memories held in wool and soil as opera arias play in her studio. Want to take part? Check out our submission guidelines and share a bit about your studio with us through this form! All mediums and workspaces are welcome, including your home studio.
Lilit Martirosyan works in Yerevan, Armenia, and has been in her current studio for around three and a half years. An average day begins at 8 am, when sunlight pours through the floor-to-ceiling window and casts a checkered shadow across the floor. The room stays bright until 1 pm, so she tries to spend her mornings there while the light lasts. Sometimes she becomes fully absorbed in a project and stays until evening; at other times, between works, she sketches, develops ideas slowly, explores materials, and browses the artist books around her.
Martirosyan moves between installation, painting, and printmaking, so her routine and materials shift constantly. She describes work that can range from sifting soil to experimenting with oil paint on a surface. When she is developing a series, she often alternates between pieces while they dry, though she generally prefers to complete one project before starting another. There is always something playing in the background, and her tastes run from old music and classic rock to ’30s jazz and, more recently, opera arias that help her “phase away.”
She says the studio gives her a level of focus she does not find elsewhere. Because her living space is separate from her artistic one, she can be as messy and free as she wants in the process, allowing people in only when she is comfortable with what they see. While ideas may come from anywhere, she feels the making is best done in the studio, without distraction and surrounded by her own creative “artifacts.” For her, it functions like a saving bank of creative energy, and returning to it is a conscious psychological choice.
The studio sits in the industrial part of the city, where noise is constant but, as she puts it, has its own charm once you adjust to it. The building is a former Soviet-era silk factory: the first floor now houses a gold market, while the rest is filled with small factories and studios. She loves the high ceilings, the nearly perfect cube shape, and the large window, and says the space feels welcoming rather than abusive because she can begin again without carrying the aggravation of past work. What she would change is its distance from home, since the 40-minute commute is something she tries to treat as a legal time out.
Martirosyan’s favorite local museum is the Cafesjian Center for the Arts. At the moment, she especially enjoys working with natural materials such as wool and soil, drawn to their tactile qualities and cultural and philosophical resonance. She has recently been developing a series of soil installations shown in her project Body of Earth at ICA Yerevan, curated by Lilit Grigoryan. The works involved a physical process of sifting, gluing, and pressing, but also a collaborative one, as the material often seemed to direct her. The resulting ripped soil “sculptures” addressed land commodification and post-war traumas, expressing the human condition through the condition of land.
