About
Frauke Materlik is an artist, a gardener, and a landscape architect.
Her work evolves from a certain awareness of and within landscape and environments, what they hold, conceal, transform, and convey. She refers to her works as fictional landscapes, negotiations between the material and the immaterial. Her method is based in presence: observing, collecting, translating, with the understanding that landscape communicates in registers that neither language nor rational logic can fully grasp. Horticulture, multispecies thinking, and critical geography are as central to her practice as the camera or the performing body. All three disciplines, visual art, horticulture, and landscape architecture, inform her work. Alongside her visual and horticultural practice, she writes on landscape, gardens, and acts of tending.
Frauke has spent extended time walking borders, coasts, and tidal edges, making work far from studio settings, across landscapes as different as Greenland, Newfoundland, South Korea, Lithuania, and the garden archives of Rachel Bunny Mellon in Virginia. Underlying all of it is the inquiry into how landscape mirrors and shapes society and vice versa. Where does the body end and the landscape begin, and what knowledges live in that threshold?
Frauke did her MA at Central Saint Martins, and completed studies in landscape architecture at the University of Greenwich and the Royal Agricultural College in Copenhagen. She has worked as a professional gardener for many seasons while also tending to her own garden, increasing biodiversity and native planting.
In 2017 she initiated Kunstverein Lunden, a cultural meeting place in a former boarding school on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein. It brings together artists and researchers for performances, residencies, walks, and communal meals, for projects and encounters in communication with their surroundings.
Frauke Materlik is a member of PAB Performance Art Bergen and, together with Marit Tunestveit Dyre and Kyuja Bae, one of the curators of the Bergen International Performance Festival 2026.
photo: Christof Zwiener
Download Frauke Materlik's CV here