While in residence this month visual artist Isabella Martin has been working on a project mapping the city’s rhythms and temporalities in relation to the body. She’s been exploring ideas of place-specific time, with an interest in how to connect the experience of moving through and navigating around the city to observations of its constantly changing weather conditions. Her project has focussed on the grids of the white limestone blocks which make up Lisbon’s pavements. The stones give a specific rhythm to walking around the city; softened by weather and human activity, moulded and polished by daily footsteps. In the Open Studio she’ll shares her work and process from her time in residence, and present a limited-edition risograph poster created in collaboration with Zaratan and Stolen Prints. The artist talk will be dedicated to explore some of these ideas in connection to her wider practice and featuring a screening of a few of the artist’s short films.

BIOGRAPHY | ISABELLA MARTIN is a visual artist who works with people and places to explore the dialogue between the body and the world. Her practice utilises embodied and scientific knowledge to challenge normative perceptions of time and space and offer new perspectives on biology, environment and climate. Ongoing projects explore the body’s internal clock and urban and oceanic temporalities. Through interdisciplinary and collaborative processes, Isabella’s work dissects and reconciles different knowledge systems to explore our entanglement with our environment, creating works that play with and question our relationship to place. Her practice is context-specific and often driven by collaborations with the sciences and local communities. These combined experiences inform a methodology that mixes the playful and the serious, logic and imagination. Isabella has shown her work internationally, with recent collaborative projects focusing on urban climate futures with schoolchildren, circadian rhythms with biologists and ocean waves with physicists. She holds a BA(hons) in Sculpture from Brighton University and an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts with a Minor in Art, Writing and Research.

LINK | https://isabellarosemartin.com/

SUPPORT | Isabella’s residency is supported by the Goethe Institute and the Danish Arts Foundation. Zaratan – Arte Contemporânea is a structure supported by República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes.