Artist of the week 181: Daria Martin

Martin's 'daydream machine' films fuse fantasy and reality in seductive jumbles of emotion and physical experience
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Still from Daria Martin's art work Birds
Topsy-turvy sensuality … Birds, a film by Daria Martin. Photograph: Courtesy The Artist/ICA PR

A topsy-turvy sensuality tumbles through Daria Martin's seductive films. In her 16mm productions from the past decade, pale flesh has writhed against sweeping banisters, been caressed by robots and shared the pain of electronic goods. It's not just people who find themselves caught up in inter-species mismatches. Art mediums mingle and psychological states are given a tactile reality.

The UK-based American artist has described her films as "daydream machines". They're spaces where fantasies can be freely let loose. And it's creating odd couplings of people and things, dalliances with art, dance and film history, or crafting cinematic love letters to outdated culture, that Martin is interested in.

Trained as a painter, she first made her name with a trilogy of films that brought modernist art into a realm of playful make-believe. Birds, from 2001, translates Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus ballet costumes into a hand-painted, knocked-together set with retro-futuristic fancy dress, in which Martin's cast strike campy tableaux vivants. It's a sweet but not uncritical daydream, about living in another age, and highlights modernism's ill-conceived love of pure geometric forms at the expense of actual living people.

Since then, Martin's films have moved beyond the private world of the studio set and such specific references to art history. Her work Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon is like a loosened-up take on Leni Riefenstahl, turning the archaic high point of early 20th-century Olympics into a freeform journey of beautiful bodies in nature. Harp Strings and Lava realises a friend's childhood nightmare as a fresh encounter between a woman and the sounds and surfaces of objects, from snarled threads to crinkling skins. As in a fever dream, it's as if textures could be heard or noises felt.

Continuing the sensory jumble, in Martin's latest film, Sensorium Tests, she explores mirror-touch synaesthesia, a rare, recently diagnosed disorder, where people physically experience touches levied on other people and things. A hand brushing the velvet back of a sofa might be felt on a sufferer's own body, and even acts seen on screen can be experienced.

Martin's recreation of the original synaesthesia lab tests – a simple set-up where a woman's face is touched in rhythm with hands patting an electric fan or hi-fi speaker – crackles with psychological ambiguity. Sharp, paranoia-inducing glances between the scientists, a confusion of skins both organic and man-made, the vivid colours of a poster, or the weft and warp of fabric in closeup take us right inside the synaesthete's hyper-sensitive mind.

Why we like her: Soft Materials, where the pint-sized, wonderfully ad hoc "embodied artificial intelligence" creations of a Zurich lab – exposed circuit boards, angel hair sensors and taped-together plastic limbs – mimic the bodies of Martin's performers.

New wave: Rita Tushingham, star of 1960s British classics such as A Taste of Honey, plays the mysterious coach in Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon.

Where can I see her? MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, until 8 April.

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