Floor Martens - Verstrengeld

Floor Martens (1998 Reuver) graduated in Fine Arts at the Maastricht Institute of Arts in 2019. In her practice, she explores the transformation processes of humans, animals, and nature, as well as the connections between them. The values of our physical material are often an important subject in her work, as well as themes such as intimacy, emotion, (in)tangibility, and vulnerability. By intervening in the process of decay or holding onto its traces, she finds a way to hold on to memory and keep something alive. Photographing bodies of loved ones, trees, flowers, self-portraits, the sea, or sky has become a way for Martens to freeze time. In stills, she tries to capture corporeal expressions of their psyches. Whether an animal’s life is cut short or a body forever distilled in a frame, Martens looks for vestiges of the soul, of the ineffable, in moments of arrested movement. For these subjects, she mainly uses photographic images, printed in analogue techniques, but she also uses other media, such as written text, audio, installation, book form, and sculpture.