Martha Friend’s Somerville home is a canvas for her found object art

Take a small detour from the community path near Magoun Square and you may stumble upon “The Emerald City” — an intricate art installation made out of green glass, metal and other materials. This piece, along with many others, surrounds the house of Martha Friend, a found object artist who has lived in Somerville for almost 30 years.

Friend’s world of whimsy is not limited to the outside of her home. Upon entering, one can see how almost every inch of wall is taken up by her own creations. Some of these include patchwork amalgamations attached to vintage mesh box springs, themed dioramas that come to life with lights. Her collection also includes pieces acquired from local artists, including a lamp of dark metals reminiscent of the steampunk style, and her children’s finely aged imaginative artwork, reflective of the colorful environment in which they grew up.

To create almost all of her art installations, Friend uses “found objects,” which is a broad term, but for her, this means items she finds in flea markets, thrift stores, yard sales or even foraging in the woods. While the pieces she creates are unique, she believes the materials she finds are not.

“All of this stuff is available to everybody, you just need to look,” Friend said.

In addition to making her own pieces with found objects, Friend also enjoys the art of collecting unusual or interesting things, such as the array of portrait mannequin heads displayed in many of her common areas.

Friend’s love for many forms of art spans as far back as she can remember.

“I’ve always been a creative person,” she said. “I do a lot of sewing, which I’ve always done. I always loved — I don’t want to use the word junk, that’s a bad word in the art world — found objects, beautiful, rusty objects that have been out weathering in the woods for years, and there’s just a lot of really interesting stuff like that.”

Long before she developed as a found object artist, Friend was a professional photographer. Her work primarily centered around brides and children. A photograph she took of her own children is hanging up prominently in her living room.

“My favorite photograph [is] of my children … when they were little,” she said. “It was one of those things where I said, ‘Go dress up!’ And my daughters come back out with these little bathing suits. … My son has a Superman costume, which is a blue nightie plus a dish towel, he just made this little costume up, and he was Superman. I’ve always loved that photograph of my three kids more than anything.”

Later in life, Friend got her master’s in social work and decided to become a teacher at Revere High School, where she did not teach art, even though people often assume she did.

“I taught health for the first number of years which, in high school, was great because it was really a sex-ed class, and the kids really wanted it and needed it and had a million things they wanted to learn,” Friend said.

Her social work degree came into more use when she took a one year sabbatical from teaching to go to Bolivia with her daughter, where she did volunteering and work in that field. Once she came back to Revere, she spent the rest of her career teaching English as a Second Language courses for immigrant students.

While Friend loved teaching, micromanaging from school administrators became too much for her, leading her to retire. Once she left the classroom, she dove headfirst into her first major found object installation — the “Emerald City.”

It was built about a decade ago but still stands, taking up a large part of Friend’s backyard today.

“It looked great when I first did it. On a beautiful sunny day like now, it still looks good,” she said. “It’s fallen down a million times. I’ve had to rebuild it. Stuff breaks. So, it doesn’t look like how it looked in the beginning, but that’s okay. It’s an outdoor glass fragile sculpture; it’s not going to last forever.”

Friend built “Sapphire City” in her front yard soon after, and is made of mostly blue hues of glass. She noted that the objects for this piece were a bit harder to come by than those of “Emerald City.”

The majority of her other pieces surrounding the house feature intentionally placed, painted plastic animals. Multicolored horses and action figures adorn her roof in an installation called “Dance Parties.” And, hidden under a tree on the side of her house is a herd of silver elephants listening to their leader in the installation “All Hail Grand Poobah.”

After circling the house several times, you’d find that there is something new to discover on each loop.

Friend is currently in the process of creating a new installation; she would like to add a third “city” to accompany Emerald and Sapphire.

“It has to do with humans, kind of starting over — end-of-the-world kind of stuff,” she said. “And then starting over with building communities and towns using the materials that civilization dropped behind.”

Friend has created her art with the intention to share it. At any time of year, passersby can observe the many different installations that decorate her property. During the first weekend of May, she opens up her home for the annual Somerville Open Studios event, so anyone can see her well-known interior decor.

“I [opened] up my house, and I used to sell work in addition, but it really became clear that people just wanted to see the house,” Friend said. “So … I don’t sell anything anymore, really. And at this point, I don’t want to, because I like everything I make, and it’s part of a bigger whole.”