Rima Martens is an emerging artist living and working in the upper Blue Mountains of NSW, on the beautiful lands of the Gundungurra and Darug people.

Her work is fuelled by a restlessness and a desire to harness the human potential found in devotion. Working across painting, drawing, poetry and sculpture, her practice draws on the organic structures of the natural world to create work that unsettles the boundaries between body and landscape, joy and suffering, the familiar and the unknown.

Her previous work as a criminal defence solicitor and her involvement in three royal commissions for the NSW Government inform an ongoing interest in integrity, vulnerability and the complexities of human experience. For Rima, justice is an emotional process. She is curious about what justice demands when we are held in love. She carries stories shared by both victims and perpetrators and has witnessed how these roles overlap. Her work considers how these roles and cycles of harm and vulnerability exist beyond human relationships and in the natural world.

a life, it seems, is a colossal collaboration

one giant conversation, heal and toe

i bow down to my partners

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Rima Martens (b.1995) holds a Bachelor of Arts (Creative Writing) and a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) from Macquarie University, and is currently studying Visual Arts at TAFE NSW. Her poetry has been published in LOR Journal, The Quarry, The Quo, Running Dog and in E/merge, a digital collection published by the Emerging Writers Festival. In 2021, she was mentored by Brook Emery through the Australian Association of Authors, where she produced a manuscript of illustrated poetry.