At DRAW Space in April 2025, Martin John Oldfield explores the slippery commingling of drawing and sculpture with his site-specific installation Purple Sky Trains.
An unbroken material line of purple strap extends throughout the exhibition space to conjoin various carefully refined support structures, each born from intuitive processes of high-level tinkering.
Accompanied by singular wall-mounted works, Purple Sky Trains will hold the multivalent energies of its creation in a floating tension of provisional stillness - an interval for particular attentions - suspended between laborious acts of becoming and unbecoming.
‘ …as a child, and later in life with my children, we made sky trains involving strings stretched across our living area. Inspired by this cross-generational play, ‘Purple Sky Trains’ crisscrosses the DRAW Space gallery with a continuous purple strap line linking hand-formed stone and steel objects.’
Martin John Oldfield, Jannali 2025
Martin John Oldfield in the NAS workshop, 2022
Photo: Scott Elk
Artist Bio
Through the assembly of found domestic and industrial objects, Martin John Oldfield investigates materials, personal narratives, and art made by working on the tools. Twenty years of experience repairing heavy equipment informs his technical approach to making; tinkering and shed culture are central to a life spent fixing things. Oldfield’s assemblages are punctuated with absurdity as punchlines while maintaining a dialogue with material histories and deeper existential narratives.
Oldfield was awarded the Foundations Mentorship (with Harrie Fasher) in 2025 and completed a Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture) at the National Art School (NAS, Sydney Australia) 2024. He holds multiple trade certificates in Heavy Equipment, Heavy Vehicles, and numerous post-trade courses. Oldfield’s work Stochastic Drawing was a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize #23; he won the YawWay sculpture prize in 2020 for his work Dunnage Till Now.
Recent exhibitions include Well that was fun…. 2025 (NAS Masters presentation) and Spawn (Sawmillers Sculpture Prize, McMahons Point).
EXHIBITION ESSAY
Martin John Oldfield’s Purple Sky Trains
Still sculpture, though less dense, with an ambivalence between exterior and interior.
A drawing that is habitable.
Fred Sandback
- Here and Now: Fred Sandback, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1999
you’re talking my language
If I asked Almighty AI to auto-generate a collaboration between Jessica Stockholder, Fred Sandback, a blacksmith, Phyllida Barlow, and a six-year-old, Martin John Oldfield’s Purple Sky Trains (PTS) would not surprise as an outcome. But Oldfield’s artwork is entirely original and anything but virtual. It is vibrant matter we can encounter directly, sensually, sharing indivisible time, pedestrian space, and the enigma of being. It is ‘right there along with everything else in the world’, as Sandback said about his austere spatial interventions.
a wild cohesive assemblage
In this particular space, about 9m long x 4.5 wide x 4m high, this white box display space, empty but for its plenitude of potential and behavioural conventions, a broad, thin purple polypropylene line stretches and turns amongst and between singular aggregates of stone and steel. A few independent yet kindred wall assemblages circumscribe, like companionate sentinels. The entire site-specific installation silently expresses a teleological purpose of theatrical thingyness that dissolves and reconstitutes function into a form of poetry, a poetry of forms. What the ‘stuff’ was originally made for or to do is subdued beneath its wilful subversion to an alternative system of signs & meanings in the teeming cosmos of art.
tension and prospect
Purple Sky Trains contains the multivalent energies of its creation held in a tension of provisional stillness, an interval for particular attentions suspended between laborious acts of becoming and unbecoming. The artist laboured long ‘behind the scenes’ in his studio, shed, garden and backyard deck to rehearse and prepare for the site-specific emergence of this work of art that oscillates agreeably between sculpture and drawing. The unremarked residues of its formation - grains of sand, oily metal swarf, dry wood shavings, debris, dusts and strands, blood and sweat - are long adrift from their parent wholes, orphaned particles awander, swirling, seeking their next becoming.
dibujos sin papel
In situ now, this cogent installation invites and enables our choreographic interaction before the near future of its disassembly and disappearance. In the brief meantime, we can wander within this consolidated tableau vivant - a drawing without paper - seeking unique perspectives, bodily shifting points and fields of view to optically rearrange its constituent elements across an infinitude of possible compositions.
SIMANCO, 2025. Steel and Singer sewing machine parts. 34 x 21.5 x 12cm.
you are what you do
Oldfield is an artist who thrives through engagement with materials - forging, bending, cutting into and through, joining, clamping, fixing, breaking, striving, dancing, cussing, pulling down, starting over, generating innumerable questions that demand but may not (yet) have answers. He recognises and values equally the creativities inherent in professional trades, amateur tinkering, shed culture and the artist’s studio, interrogating the varying constructions of identity arising from these culturally variant works of hand and tools of trade, and the social capital of what he terms ‘capability value’.
an aleatory swerve
Hiding within Purple Sky Trains and its autonomous attendants are remnants of material and social histories in the form of decontextualised fragments salvaged from outdated machines and abandoned artefacts collected by the artist. An example that children of the mid-20th century may recall is the Singer sewing machine, a mechanical invention of the mid-19th century that ingeniously compressed industrial manufacture to a domestic scale.
Oldfield found a derelict Singer languishing at Harrie Fisher’s ‘Foundations’ studio in Portland, NSW, and she gifted the relic to him. He has lovingly disassembled it, marvelling at the ingenuity of its construction and attending to the memory of the diverse workers who forged its hundreds of intricately interlinked parts, symbols of ways of working and life since aggressively eclipsed by the ubiquity of plastics, alloys, robotics and the capitalist foregrounding of profit-over-quality. The artist repurposes such relict artefacts of the material languages of modernity, their use value eroded by the perpetual weather of technological supersession, and reanimates them toward more postmodern ends.
joy in grandfather’s shed
Oldfield’s first significant solo exhibition since his MFA graduation from the National Art School, Purple Sky Trains was inspired by & celebrates trans-generational experiences of familial creative play, of being in that pleasurable state of beginners mind before things fell into line, were disciplined to function, when everything could be anything, anything everything. Oldfield appreciates the continuity of imaginative playtime in the family context, its importance in forging bonds of experience & memory - my parent played with me as I play with my child. Through play, we learn about things, the world, each other and being together, and begin to comprehend who we, in our differences, are.
from mind and hand
Touching, gripping, twisting, hovering in suspension, the industrial-purple material line traverses the gallery space, taut and turning at intervals of material or mechanical punctuation, describing a path of desire of its own becoming. This line is a drawing - trace & residue of thought into action, evidence in the world of the artist’s muscle memory, his embodied sensory compendium of febrile touch-action learning attained in exploration of the will to know matter, things and self through acts of transformation.
snapping the string
Martin John Oldfield has brought Purple Sky Trains into vibrant temporary being for our shared consideration, a generous and salutary offering of presence made of matter ancient, modern and mundane, entangled with the artist’s intuitive intent to converse with us across the distances of one to other, then to now, mind to body, nothing to know-how.
Gary Warner
March 2025
