In 2022, at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, Martha Poggioli returned to the image that she would go on to call The Bug: a form that emerged through an exercise of repeatedly drawing and connecting the limb-like appendages of IUD contraceptive technologies. Diverging from the design and sculptural focus of her practice, she felt inexplicably compelled to remake the same form in a ripe hue of bile yellow. The resulting oil painting was an almost premonitory image. Presented at the Sharpe-Walentas Open Studios in the spring of 2023 alongside Poggioli’s sculptures—works drawing on the material vocabulary, such as silicone and steel, of the surgical theater—the creaturely form of The Bug appeared almost out of place.
I recently caught up with Martha on the occasion of her current residency and solo exhibition at lower_cavity, an artist-run project space housed in the catacombs of a former paper mill in Holyoke. The exhibition, also titled “The Bug” and on view through August 15, reimagines this dank subterranean space as a medieval research laboratory: surgical clamps, dripping tubes, and syringes subtly hint at the sterility of contemporary medicine, while a workshop space replete with macerating brews, potions, and admixtures recalls much older herbalist traditions. In this conversation, Poggioli reflects on the act of making as both a generative and divinatory process, recalling the premodern indistinction between art, science, and magic that has become a central preoccupation of her recent artistic research.
Isabella Cilia: You have been in residence since late May at lower_cavity, where you’ve been working on your current exhibition, “The Bug.” Can you tell me about that project?
Martha Poggioli: The project circulates around this idea of emergence and the spaces between rotting and aliveness. I’ve been making these bug-like creatures for a while. They’re hybridized forms and these ones are cast in iron. I cast them at [the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry residency program] in 2024, and at the time I’d already visited lower_cavity and was talking to Tony [Discenza, who runs the space] about coming out and making a project. So the project’s been kind of festering in my mind for a few years now, and I’ve been making these bugs for longer than that. They’re derived from the limbs of IUDs, but they have a double or triple meaning for me in that they remind me of organic forms that connote emergence, like sprouts, hair follicles, nerve endings, tadpoles, and sperm: this sort of fertile, living, emerging thing that is reaching towards light and becoming life.
IC: “The Bug” has an interesting connection to the landscape surrounding lower_cavity. In particular, you’ve been creating drawings with inks that you concocted from locally foraged plants. Can you tell me how this plant-based component of the project emerged?
MP: When I visited in early 2024, I was kind of blown away. The rooms feel very wet. Even in the winter, the walls feel very alive. And when I returned this summer, I spent a lot of my time during the residency outside walking on the trails. Partially, you know, enjoying myself because it’s so beautiful and green, verdant and fecund. But I was also in pursuit of this particular tree called buckthorn which has become a kind of protagonist in this project.
Buckthorn berries have been used since the medieval times to create sap green, which is an old color that painters know of. It’s also referred to as bladder green because the ink would be stored in pig bladders to keep it from rotting—which to me, as a person who’s worked a lot in biotech, is really wild and strange, and also obvious. The green found in a lot of illuminated manuscripts was inked with sap green.
Buckthorn grows very prolifically in the wild of Western Massachusetts and most of the Northeast. I think it’s considered a weed here. When I arrived, I was intent on finding a way to incorporate it into the project. So I spent a lot of my time outside looking for the berries, identifying them, learning about the history, and then also inside, cooking, straining, and milking the berries of their pigment.
IC: This reminds me of another, much earlier project of yours titled “Rational Behavior” (2019). The sculpture works in that show, constructed from brushed aluminum, glass, and plastics, draw on a very different, though quite relevant, green, which we might refer to as hospital scrub green.
MP: That kind of blueish-green hospital glove or scrubs green also shares a tonal quality with the sort of Tiffany green that you see on patinaed sculptures. Any piece of bronze or metal with copper in it ends up having this sort of powdery blue-green quality. And so maybe it is actually a continuum that I’ve been chasing. I’m generally chasing a color.
In this particular instance of The Bug, I didn’t know what the meaning of that color was necessarily. The color of the bug forms have this more chartreuse hue, or alive and rotting quality, to them, almost becoming yellow. It’s a color that’s so fresh and bright but also gooey and pustule-like—like the chrysalis that turns into goo and then recomposes itself into a butterfly. This idea of fecundity or festering feels like it’s embodied in that color.
What you’re talking about is really interesting because I suspect that I’m trying to move away from the clinical origins of a lot of my practice. I have this desire for the sort of gooey thresholds that are undefined. And maybe that color does that.
IC: Your background in design led you to work in biotech for several years while you continued developing projects such as An Incomplete Contraceptive Chronology, 1838–2026 (2018–), an ongoing map that charts the shifting morphologies of contraceptive devices since 1838. Can you tell me how your experiences in biotech have informed your studio practice?
MP: The medical device world was very strange. I was doing a lot of observational work that formed part of larger research projects that brought together scientists, surgeons, and engineers to develop new technology for minimally invasive surgery. And I’m thinking about how this desire for this yellow green feels almost connected to experiences of being inside of these labs. I’ve been in enough cadaver and animal labs to have felt like I’ve kind of bridged this divide between festering and fecundity. That spectrum of aliveness and not-quite-aliveness became very much embodied for me during that time, and maybe there was a part of me that has needed to process that through a studio-based practice.
I’ve been obsessively cataloging contraceptive devices for about eight years now. Google Patents became a really interesting place for me, and also the US patent office. There are a lot of digitized places that you can find patents cataloged. As a person who has an IUD, this has become a phenomenological and philosophical focus of my practice. In 2022 when Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was starting to look at other ways of thinking about abortifacients and biopower through plant-based remedies.
IC: Throughout your work, you often draw parallels between the past and the present, particularly between the premodern and the contemporary eras. Can you tell me about this fixation?
MP: I’m so intoxicated by the premodern. I don’t fully know why, but it does feel like a very magical, deeply charged time or place. Despite the terror of our present, I have no illusions that society is inherently better for people now than it was then. But I think to learn through and to speculate through the past feels kind of like a divinatory act and a magical process.
I’m deeply interested in magic and I think it was more tangible then than it is now. In many ways, I am just as seduced by the premodern as I am by new technologies. I feel very pulled back and forth. When I concoct an ink that was made 800 years ago, or when I remake a device that was used by someone 2000 years ago, it feels like I’m traveling back in time, and to me, that’s really magical. It’s not just the past that lets me do that—it’s digital archives where I’m able to source all of those references. So yes, I’m referencing the past, or, like Jentery Sayers talks about, prototyping the past, but the act of making is being done in the present.
Material history gives us trajectories of what we’ve managed to hold onto. So I really like fucking with it in a way that helps me learn through making and to think through my hands. I mean, I don’t think that this particular project is finished either because my hunch is that it will have a second life, which will be a third project that puts it into the future rather than just existing in the past and the present. The nice thing about a space like lower_cavity is that you can be experimenting and not everything needs to be seen immediately. Things can stay dormant until they’re ready to emerge.
