Els Martens work is about the embodied act of looking at the landscape and transferring that embodied experience through the medium of photography and photobooks. Central to her work is the (re)construction of a complex, layered spatiotemporal fabric and the dismantling of the linearity of both time and space, referring to the ever changing state of things, and our perception of it.
Inspired by more isolated ways of living among nature, she repeatedly returns to the same places, mostly up North, to explore the landscape as a physical, mental and social place. By revisiting these places, she also revisits the things she sees, while continuing to look for and discover new elements. Working with a 50-mm lens, the artist consciously chooses a technology that is believed to imitate natural vision the closest. She largely abandons the linear perspective, which organizes pictorial perception according to an objective grid. In stead, she prefers, a more subjective-affective approach, involving the use of atmospheric perspective, full-bleed images, close-ups, and image distortions.
The photobook medium, as a vessel for experience, introduces yet another layer to her work: the pacing of the book and its unique potential to activate photography. The turning of the page and the turning of the gaze essentially mobilise the image. Rhythmically, there’s a close and at the same time disturbing harmony in her books between the sequence of the image and that of the page, while the artist is balancing the tension between a still and moving image, gently switching between orientation and disorientation, between a slow-paced repetitive rhythm and a fragmented one, slowing down and speeding up, moving forward and backwards, zooming in and out.
Inspired by more isolated ways of living among nature, she repeatedly returns to the same places, mostly up North, to explore the landscape as a physical, mental and social place. By revisiting these places, she also revisits the things she sees, while continuing to look for and discover new elements. Working with a 50-mm lens, the artist consciously chooses a technology that is believed to imitate natural vision the closest. She largely abandons the linear perspective, which organizes pictorial perception according to an objective grid. In stead, she prefers, a more subjective-affective approach, involving the use of atmospheric perspective, full-bleed images, close-ups, and image distortions.
The photobook medium, as a vessel for experience, introduces yet another layer to her work: the pacing of the book and its unique potential to activate photography. The turning of the page and the turning of the gaze essentially mobilise the image. Rhythmically, there’s a close and at the same time disturbing harmony in her books between the sequence of the image and that of the page, while the artist is balancing the tension between a still and moving image, gently switching between orientation and disorientation, between a slow-paced repetitive rhythm and a fragmented one, slowing down and speeding up, moving forward and backwards, zooming in and out.