About Martin

And always, this clawing

Martin Chanda is a full-time professional artist who works across mediums in Switzerland. He has exhibited around the world, and his work can be found in various governmental and private collections. He has established the Martin Chanda Foundation in Zambia, which fosters upcoming artists.

He studied sculpture in Lusaka, Zambia, and has a masters degree in fine art from the Valais School of Art in Switzerland: the École de design et haute école d’art du Valais.

His work ranges from sculpture to drawing to painting to photography to installations. It often involves various mediums even within the same artwork. It is obvious to me that Martin does not recognize boundaries, whether physical or philosophical. And I see him as an artist in that truer, all-encompassing sense, not just an artist as a person who creates things by hand. He is an artist in a much deeper sense. In the sense that he lives and breathes his art, whatever that is. It is him. Organic, cutting across lines, blending into things and one another. A mix of his roots and experiences. And from that experience: a rawness, a struggle, a recognition of the good and the bad, and, always, an attempt at expression of the entire spectrum in-between. And, always, this clawing at what may lie beyond.

That dark, jet-black clay

Where did it all start? Far away from Switzerland, where he now lives and works. Somewhere outside Lusaka in Zambia. He would play with clay as a child. That first time he would experience the earth between his hands, and the thrill of shaping it. That dark, jet-black clay.

Decades later, a friend took him to Rockstone, a sculpture studio, with its group of talented, established artists. The first time Martin visited with a mutual friend, one of the artists pointed to a stone and asked if he could carve. Martin immediately picked up a hammer and started chipping away. By that evening, he had finished.. and was made part of the team on the spot. Martin hasn’t stopped since.

The studio had a handful of sculptors of the highest level. “It was,” Martin says, “like a group of elite athletes.” To survive, you had to be extremely talented, and keep up with the rest. The studio was a playground of ideas and a well of energy and potential. He was amongst giants, and it brought out the best in him.

The artists would literally go into the bush around Lusaka, looking for marble boulders, just lying around. They would go to the studio at 4am and leave 20 hours later. Sculpture takes time, and Martin was drawn into its rhythm. It was then that he discovered who he was.

The body draws itself

Why move on from sculpture to drawing? “Because drawing is a blueprint for everything. You can’t run away from drawing. Even a sculptor has to know how to draw.

“If you look at cave drawings you will see that humans don’t have to try to be artists. You look at your shadow, and see it’s a drawing. The body draws itself.

“As humans, we have that inside us. But at the end of the day, things have to be discovered.”

Art as language

“Things have to be discovered, and you have to be at the right place at the right time. And when you’re there, you feel it.

“Sometimes, at Rockstone, I found myself alone, but I continued working. That’s when I knew this is what I wanted to do. It opened doors that I would never have imagined opening. Brushing shoulders with people I wouldn’t have dreamed of.

“Because I had this passport that was my art. It enabled me to be in that same space. Art became the vehicle through which I could speak. Art became my language.”

– Pinaki. Valais, April 2023.