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Emilia Martin is fascinated by stones. Apart from being drawn to their appearance, she has a particular interest in the stories connected to them. From Medusa’s gaze that turned people to stone according to the Greek myth, to rocks supposedly touched by saints and therefore worshipped: according to Martin, stones tell us the history of human relationships, in which fact and fiction have become intertwined. Over the past year, the artist has been collecting numerous of these – often unheard – stories. Consisting of photographs, texts, and audio, her installations not only give these stories a platform, but also stretch reality.
In the project I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears (2022-ongoing), Martin focuses on meteorites. They intrigue her because of the contradictory emotions they evoke. She considers them first-hand witnesses from outer space, travellers from deep time who may offer us a glimpse of the origins of life on earth. ‘And yet,’ Martin says, ‘they are also just stones, items we usually associate with passiveness and silence and therefore symbolic of the inability to communicate.’ Her series combines photographs and either manipulated or unmanipulated, archival images – a crowd gathering around a boulder, a luminescent rock, a crater – with details from eyewitness accounts describing meteoric impacts, as well as excerpts from scientific journals that try to debunk supernatural reports. Combined with a stone that appears to be whispering, the series breathes a surrealistic atmosphere, inviting us to open our minds to a reality situated somewhere between truth and imagination.
Text: Esther Darley
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)