The Eriskay Connection

Sharing the Land – Notes on Nature explores how human beings perceive, represent, and give meaning to nature – and how these processes continually shape one another. For Sabina Timmermans (NL), the starting point is personal: growing up among the plants in her parents’ nursery garden fostered an intuitive connection with the living world, one that now underpins her artistic exploration of the ever-evolving relationship between humans and landscape.

Timmermans understands our perception of nature as a combination of physical encounters and cultural framing. Individual experiences are shaped, in part, by collective images passed down through art, literature, and science. She reflects on the influence of Romanticism, suggesting how its vision of ‘untouched nature’ has contributed to the persistent separation between humans and the natural world – a concept increasingly challenged within ecological and posthumanist thought.

Her practice spans drawing, painting, and spatial installation. It begins in the landscape, where she spends long periods experiencing its physical and sensory elements. She gathers observations, photographs, and notes, which in the studio develop into large charcoal drawings, collages, and clay models. For Timmermans, drawing is both a physical and meditative act, sustaining a ongoing dialogue with a place. By extracting natural forms from their original context and rendering them as sculptural, bodily presences, her images take on the resemblance of living beings. The layered process of creation mirrors the slow rhythms of natural growth.

Often working in series based on specific sites – mountains, forests, botanical gardens – Timmermans has undertaken residencies in the Netherlands, Germany, and Norway. Sharing the Land emphasises her focus on the creative process, combining artworks with photographs, field notes, and texts by guest writers Rebecca Nelemans and Norbert Peeters. Together, they contribute to an ongoing discourse on our relationship with nature, and invite the reader into a more conscious and sensorial encounter with the landscapes around them.