'The constructions such as I seek to make are based on implications of movement and infinity by positive and negative means'. Mary Martin, statement in Structure, Amsterdam, 1962.

Mary Martin followed her first abstract painting in 1950 with her first experiment in three-dimensional abstraction when she made Columbarium (Estate of the Artist) in 1951, the same year that her husband Kenneth Martin had made his first mobile sculpture. He described the inspiration for their move to abstraction that year, 'I spent a day at the East End home of Nigel Henderson... Eduardo Paolozzi was there and we went to his studio nearby. Told me about killed plaster - gave me some aluminium and...