Christina Martinelli is an interdisciplinary artist working with patterns to convey information about experiences of loss, mysticism and language through a feminist lens. Her practice examines the connection between images and codes and the ways in which patterns can both obscure and reveal coded meanings within personal experiences and within more universal methods of communication such as written texts. Recurring aspects of language that she researches are semaphore flag signaling as a system of visual language, the syllabic structures of poetry, and ways that words can be communicated across distances. She investigates these themes through drawings, artists’ books, paintings, sculptures, and fibers. Each individual artwork is an element of her research into building a universal visual language with the ultimate goal of bringing visual art closer in received experience to that of listening to music. 

Christina Martinelli was born and raised in New York City and lives and works in Brooklyn. She has exhibited at Bladr, Copenhagen, Denmark; NYU’s 80WSE Gallery, New York, NY; ConnerSmith, Washington, D.C.; Open Space, Baltimore, MD; among others and has attended residencies at The Center for Book Arts, New York City; The Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; SÍM Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland; The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, NE; and The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY. She received her MFA in sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her BA from Bennington College.