Some artworks ask us to remember specific moments. Sarah Martin’s work does something more elusive. It invites us to remember feelings—those fragments of places, seasons, and experiences that remain long after the details have faded.

Opening June 13 at Canada House Gallery, For the Love Of presents a new capsule collection of works that explore memory through vintage photography, paint, and pattern. Drawing from forgotten images and familiar landscapes, Martin creates compositions that feel suspended between past and present, balancing nostalgia with contemporary visual energy.

Memory as Material

At the heart of Martin’s practice is a fascination with vintage photography. Rather than treating old photographs as historical documents, she approaches them as emotional objects—fragments of time capable of carrying personal and collective memories into the present.

Her process begins with archival portraits, landscapes, and everyday scenes. Onto these images she layers paint, patterns, and textures that simultaneously preserve and transform the original photograph. The result is work that feels both familiar and unsettled, encouraging viewers to reconsider the relationship between memory and reality.

Landscapes That Hold Stories

Martin often speaks about growing up surrounded by forests, lakes, and the shifting rhythms of the Canadian seasons. Those experiences continue to shape her work today, informing her understanding of landscape not simply as scenery, but as a keeper of stories.

For her, places absorb traces of the people who move through them. A shoreline, a woodland path, or a forgotten roadside view can become connected to personal histories and shared cultural memory. Her paintings explore those connections, asking how landscapes help define who we are and what we choose to remember.

Painting Between Past and Present

One of the most distinctive aspects of Martin’s work is the way she bridges historical imagery and contemporary aesthetics. Vintage photographs provide a clear sense of time and place, while her painted interventions introduce something playful, immediate, and alive.

Soft colours, polka-dot patterns, and textured surfaces appear throughout her compositions. These elements never completely obscure the original image. Instead, they create a conversation between eras, allowing the past to coexist with the present rather than disappear beneath it.

Reimagining Familiar Canada

More recently, Martin has begun deconstructing vintage photographs, cutting and rearranging images to create entirely new compositions. The shift moves her work away from specific locations and toward something broader and more emotional.

Rather than documenting particular places, these reconstructed landscapes aim to capture the essence of Canada itself—the feelings, rhythms, and associations that connect people to the land. In many ways, it feels like a natural evolution of her longstanding interest in memory: less concerned with what happened, and more interested in what remains.

The title For the Love Of feels fitting for a body of work rooted in affection—for places, for memories, and for the small moments that continue to shape us long after they have passed.

Through layered surfaces and quiet visual storytelling, Sarah Martin reminds us that memory is never fixed. It shifts, softens, and transforms over time. Yet somehow, certain places and images continue to pull us back. This exhibition lives within that space, exploring not just what we remember, but why we hold on to it in the first place.