About
Frauke Materlik is an artist, gardener, and landscape architect.
Through long-term site engagement, horticulture, performance, installation, and photography, her work evolves from deep attention to landscape, investigating what it holds, conceals, transforms and conveys. Her multispecies practice comes from more than 25 seasons of actual gardening and tending plants, working outside, according to climate and season, the notions of control and letting go.
Frauke refers to her works as fictional landscapes, negotiations between the material and the immaterial, based on the understanding that landscapes communicate in registers beyond language and rational logic. As part of her artistic process, she analyzes or removes the familiar, as if dissecting, scraping off slices of histories and narratives, and then translating these findings within her visual language. Horticulture, multispecies thinking, and critical geography are as central to her works as the camera or the performing body. All three disciplines - horticulture, visual art, and landscape architecture - inseparably inform her practice.
Frauke has spent extended time walking borders, coasts and tidal edges; stipends, festivals and research travels taking her to Greenland, Newfoundland, South Korea, Lithuania, and the garden archives of Rachel Bunny Mellon in Virginia. Underlying all of it is the profound inquiry into how landscapes, time, and the body entangle, where the body ends and the landscape begins: What kind of knowledge lives in that threshold?
She trained at Central Saint Martins, studied landscape architecture at University of Greenwich and The Royal Agricultural College Copenhagen, and has worked as a gardener at Bergen Botanic Garden.
In 2017 she initiated Kunstverein Lunden next to her studio and garden. It is a cultural meeting place in a former boarding school on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein, where she brings together artists, researchers and the locals for projects and encounters that evolve in communication with their surroundings.
She is a member of PAB Performance Art Bergen and co-curator of Bergen International Performance Festival 2026.
photo: Christof Zwiener
Download Frauke Materlik's CV here