isabella martin

Isabella Martin is a visual artist who works with people and places to explore how humans fit into the world, and how they shape—and are shaped by—their surroundings.

The practice draws on both embodied and scientific knowledge to challenge established perceptions of time and space, offering new perspectives on biology, the environment, and the weather.

Recent and current projects focus on the body’s internal clock, urban climate futures, and oceanic temporalities.

Isabella’s work is context-specific, shaped by interdisciplinary collaboration, experimental play, and in-depth research.

Collaborations include geologists, physicists, biologists, sailors, and schoolchildren. These diverse perspectives inform a methodology that blends the playful and the serious, logic and speculation.

Works move across mediums—sculpture, drawing, performance, participation, film, and sound—seeking to reconcile different knowledge systems and explore the nature of entanglement with the surrounding world.

Isabella is a co-founder of the research and curatorial collective Camp Little Hope, and a member of the art and game design collective Kosmologym.

Isabella's academic background includes a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture from Brighton University and an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, with a Minor in Art, Writing and Research.

Check out more of Isabella's visual art:

🌐 https://isabellarosemartin.com

📸 Instagram: @isabella.r.martin

Unless stated otherwise, all artwork and photos in this article: © Isabella Martin

How does the ocean inspire you art?

Generally I would say its slipperiness, oceans feel impossible to grasp, in both their magnitude and their workings. The notion of something in constant motion is incredibly influential on how I try and see my surroundings.

The extreme dissonance between our view of the surface and the complexity of its depths and the life they contain motivates me to make work that probes at and plays with these gaps in our perspectives and knowledge about the world.

Wells-next-the-Sea Signal Flags

Do you have a personal or first experience with the ocean that shaped your art?

I grew up by the North Sea on the Norfolk coast, my first experience of the sea is of contrasts, vast expanses of sand and sky and huge tides flooding in. Exhilaration and intrigue, paddling in muddy shallows full of crabs under the surface and sailing over deep blue depths.

This experience of a landscape in flux is central to how I try and see the world, as mutable and fluid. I still swim, sail and surf in the sea regularly. Immersion in another substance, the ability to let your feet leave the ground and still be connected to and a part of the world. The chance to see things from a watery perspective, to leave land and look back, to look out and see nothing but sea. These are experiences that continually shape my ways of thinking and working and seeing.

Tell us about art you created that is inspired by the ocean

Different bodies of water have been the focus of various projects over the last few years, often explored in collaboration with scientists and coastal communities. It’s hard to pick just one but perhaps I can give a little overview…

North Sea Semaphore is a series of filmed performances exploring the notion of the sea as a site of both communication and breakdown, a surface that connects and separates us.

Wells-next-the-Sea Signal Flags also explores the North Sea but from a land-based perspective, collaborating with local schoolchildren to imagine a new language for naval communication based on the specificities of place.

Through film, radio-work, sculpture and installation the projectWave Machines followed the journey of an ocean wave. Switching between the ocean and the laboratory it focused on the attempt to grasp something in constant motion, and the approximate nature of our knowledge about the world.

More recently I made the film Algae Blooms exploring how phytoplankton algae are affected by the warming Arctic Ocean. I’m currently working on the project Baltic Bodies, which explores the state of the Baltic through combining embodied experience and marine data.

In your opinion, why is it important to protect marine spaces?

This makes me want to give an incredibly simple answer, which is because they’re part of the world, as we are. Perhaps the fact that we can only see the surface makes marine spaces seem abstract and perhaps the need for protection less critical. It makes me wonder what it will take for us to understand on a deeper level how essential these spaces are to a functioning healthy planet. Our complete interconnectedness with the marine environment and reliance on its processes means looking after and caring for them is essential.

What can art bring to the conversation in marine protection?

When art becomes a part of the conversation around protection of marine spaces it can bring embodied, personal, emotional and also abstract perspectives and experiences of marine spaces and the multitude of life they contain and support. Art can introduce nuance to the conversation and make space for fear, hope, delight and uncertainty, complex emotions regarding the sea and its future which are difficult to share and talk about. It gives us a way of seeing and understanding marine spaces in all their complexity, and expands our capacity to connect to their realities.