Barry Martin (born 1943) is a graduate of Goldsmith's College and of St Martin's School of Art, both especially influential in the 1960s when he was studying there. He has worked in various media - including kinetic sculpture, film, performance, and the making of environments - but the constant in his work has been drawing, either as a working tool, as a means of recording and observing, or as an end in itself. For Martin, drawing is a system of signs analogous to those of language, and also an intellectual process of enquiry, analysis and proposition.
His gift of drawings spans his career from the time he was a student in the 1960s, until the 1990s. This is a piece from the mid-1980s, ‘Jigger Jagger', an abstract composition developed from forms which recurred and mutated in his work at this time. For other drawings by Martin in the V&A collection see E.315-321-2006.
