I once saw you there

In I Once Saw You There, Eline Martherus presents a new body of work exploring grief as a place rather than an emotion. Emerging from a guided meditation following the loss of her mother, the series began with an attempt to revisit and reshape a single memory. Memories are like clay: if you hold them long enough, they begin to change. During this meditation, a lagoon opened before her,a place she had never seen before, a place she still believes does not exist anywhere on earth. It felt like a landscape that had always lived in her unconscious, impossible to describe in words and perhaps never intended to be explained. From that moment, the series unfolded as a collection of imagined landscapes where memory, absence, and love quietly converge.We live in a world that worships recovery, healing, moving on, and closure, as though grief is something to conquer. At the heart of this body of work lies a different question: What do we do with the people we cannot stop carrying? While rooted in the loss of her mother, these works extend beyond autobiography. That's why this work belongs to the world: because everyone is exiled from something,a country, a childhood, a parent, a language, a first love.
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Drawing from personal memory, dreams, and the rhythms of the natural world, Martherus creates paintings that move between the tangible and the unseen. Her mother's passing transformed grief from an emotion into a landscape. Some people carry the absence of a person; others the absence of a place. Grief is love's afterlife, and losing that love is a wound no language is capable of fully describing. Grief first arrived as rage. Beneath that rage was fear. And beneath that fear, the gardens began to emerge.
The gardens in these paintings are not symbols of healing. They are places where growth and decay exist simultaneously, where memory is allowed to change shape, and where absence quietly becomes presence. Nature does not separate life from death, arrival from departure. These landscapes inhabit that same space, inviting us to dwell in the quiet tension between loss and love.