Isabella Martin
Residency date: May 2025
Project Title: Time in Common
Website: https://isabellarosemartin.com
About the artist:
Isabella Martin is a visual artist who works with people and places, exploring how we fit in the world and how we shape and are shaped by our surroundings. Her practice works with both embodied experience and scientific knowledge, challenging perceptions of time and space and offering new perspectives on our biology and our environment.
Works move across mediums and her work is context specific, driven by collaboration, material play and in-depth research. Her collaborations vary from physicists and biologists to sailors and schoolchildren, and inform a playful and experimental working process. Recent and ongoing projects focus on the body’s internal clock, urban climate futures and oceanic rhythms. She lives and works between Denmark and England.
New Forest Time
In residence, Isabella will continue her ongoing interest in place-specific time, mapping the local rhythms and temporalities of the Forest.
Starting with the question ‘What time is it in the Forest?’ Isabella will be working in collaboration with local communities to develop experimental clocks that explore experiences of time in the New Forest.
The science of circadian rhythms reveals how our bodies keep time in rhythm with our environment. This inspires an interest in the specific rhythms of our environment, and how we can connect biological and ecological temporalities. How can we entangle our rhythms with those of the forest? And what can we learn from forest time?
Interview with Isabella Martin - New Forest National Park Artist in Residence
Can you give us a brief overview of how your practice has developed and what led you to the work you produce today?
I studied sculpture at art school, because I was excited about making work that physically engaged with its surroundings. Years later this is still the case. I’m still interested in our relationship to where we are and and our experiences of place, but this has evolved to include a deeper consideration of our perceptions of time and space.
The way I work has also expanded to involve deeper immersion and engagement in a place and the people and species that inhabit it. I now work a lot more with the sciences too. I’m interested in the connection between scientific knowledge of time and space and our embodied experience, and how they influence each other.
The main constant is context-specificity, making work in response to and with people and places.
Initially, what aspects of the New Forest do you envision influencing your work the most?
There’s such a variety of habitats here, from salt marshes to heathland. In order to tackle this immensity, I’m starting very small, trying to look at the details as a way of dissecting and making sense of it all.
At this point it’s all the moving parts of the landscape I’m most excited about; the way rivers run, tides suck, gorse moves in the wind and deer cross the road.
How do you hope to engage the local community with your work?
I’m still planning the best way to do this, though I’m hoping to work with local primary schools. I often collaborate with children, I love the playful and imaginative way they interpret and think about the world. My project explores Forest Time, children experience time with an immediacy we lose grasp of as we get older, and so I’m excited to work with local students and explore forest time together: past, present and future.
Are you planning to work in any new mediums during your residency?
Always! The medium I work in is always informed by the specific project and its context. It ranges from drawing and print, film, sound, public art, sculpture, whatever fits where I am. It’s what I find most exciting about beginning a project, the uncertainty of where it will go, what mediums I’ll work with, and how the place I’m in will shape and influence these decisions.
How do you begin a day in the studio?
It changes every day, I’m not so good at routine! Sometimes a cup of tea and a moment to look at everything, take in what I’m working on and where it’s going, or think about other ways it could go. Sometimes I’m deep in a process, then I’ll just dive straight into it.
How do you like to connect with nature and the great outdoors?
Every day, in some way. Walking, running, cycling, swimming. Sometimes moving very slowly through a landscape, sometimes fast. Mostly surfing, when I’m somewhere with waves. That immersion in saltwater, being away from land looking back, the focus, delight and wildness of it, is pretty compulsive.
What tools and materials will you be sure to pack for your studio space?
Always my camera, audio recorder and sketchbook. I try and keep it simple, mostly because I like the discipline of having to work with my surroundings, and not be too influenced by a favourite material. Especially at the beginning of a project when there’s so many ideas and possibilities flying around, I like having to work with what I have and what I find.