Laurent Martin "Lo" was born in France in 1955 and trained as a visual artist and worked as a creative director in advertising and fashion. “Lo’s” first encounter with bamboo was completely circumstantial, but as he recalls, “it was love at first sight”. Bamboo became his obsession and passion that set him on a journey of discovery, which he refers to as his Bamboo Routes.

Since 2004, he has travelled to India, Southeast Asia and East Asia, as well as Latin America learning the mastery of bamboo as well as its spiritual potency. Laurent Martin “Lo” spends his time between his house-workshop in the Alt Empordà (Girona, Spain) and traveling to countries rich in bamboo. His workshop is an old factory which the artist himself has restored, and adapted to develop his art. Inside, against the walls, over the beams, one can see the different pieces of bamboo, together with those weirdly shaped tools, laid orderly near his “operating table”. Laurent Martin “Lo” is member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors and currently lives and works in Spain.

Through years of observation and studying of this amazing plant, he has come to understand its multitude of possibilities. His creativity is thus born out of his learned skills and understanding of his material. His artistic palette is within the physical and sensorial virtues of bamboo: its very sophisticated organic structure, but also its energy and spirituality. Establishing an intimate dialogue with bamboo, “Lo” experiments with its flexibility, resistance, density, lightness, mathematics and poetry, a language that allows him to combine both tension and compression, creating sculptures based on movement and balance. His work seems to defy gravity and levitate. His structures swing, drawing curves and harmony in the air. Compositions that take over the space and establish a dialogue, where the space around the piece also becomes another defining element of the piece itself, pieces with a thousand different point of views.