Raewyn Martyn

Raewyn completed her practice-based PhD through Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts at Massey University, researching both industrial and DIY (artist-made) art materials, with a focus on the possibilities of biopolymer paints. This work grew out of a desire to make paintings that could rehydrate and become liquid again, leading to collaborations with scientists and filmmakers to understand the long histories of plant-based and bacterial bio-based polymers (bioplastics) within creative and industrial practices. During her PhD, a Massey University Strategic Research Fund grant enabled work at the Crown Research Institute Scion, and this developed her interest in the biobased circular economy, from a creative and social perspective.

The bacterial polyester thermoplastics produced at Scion were used in artworks like Greywacke love poems: returns (2019). These materials have four-dimensional qualities like shape memory, the capacity to move between different shapes, triggered through temperature changes. They can change shape, and/or become kinetic, moving in response to heat or moisture. In her PhD exegesis, Martyn describes how aspects of hydrophilia and four-dimensional painting are also found in earlier creative and industrial histories of plasticity.