Isabella Martin is a visual artist based in Copenhagen with a multidisciplinary art practice. She collaborates with people and places on projects exploring our entanglement with our environment. Working with both scientific knowledge and embodied experience her work imagines ways we might navigate time and space differently and experiments with these possibilities. 

During her Imagining Godzilla residency Isabella will be continuing work on her project Baltic Bodies, which travels around the borders of the Baltic Sea and records its rhythms through combining observation with marine climate data. The project aims to combine scientific knowledge of the Baltic Sea with an embodied experience of it, in order to find and make new ways to think, speak and act concerning its critically polluted state. On board, Isabella is excited to experience a new perspective on the sea from the intimate and particular perspective of a sailboat, and will be continuing her work recording the Baltic through drawing, writing, audiovisual recordings, as well as sediment and water sampling. 

“I live where the Baltic Sea starts in Copenhagen, and watch it change with the seasons, in temperature and tone, smell and sound. I swim and surf in it regularly, familiar with its rhythms when the wind blows. It’s hard to believe that a sea which makes you feel so alive when immersed in it can also be so polluted, hence my interest in working with scientists and exploring what that might look and feel like, how its critical state could be articulated in ways we can grasp.”