Marjan Dijkstra is a printmaker based in Stordal on the west coast of Norway, where dramatic fjords, mountains, and cultivated landscapes shape both everyday life and her artistic practice. Her work explores the interconnected relationships between people, plants, biodiversity, and the natural systems that sustain us.

Drawing inspiration from her own permaculture garden and the surrounding cultural landscape, Dijkstra creates reduction linocuts, woodcuts, and mezzotints that celebrate the overlooked beauty of plants and the ecosystems they depend upon. Flowers, seeds, and botanical structures become subjects through which she explores resilience, transformation, and the delicate balance between humans and nature. By shifting attention from harvested produce to the living processes behind food production, her work encourages reflection on where our food comes from and the landscapes that make it possible.

With a background in radiography and an education from Ytre Kunstfagskole Ålesund, Dijkstra combines scientific observation with traditional printmaking. Her previous experience in medical imaging continues to influence her way of seeing — focusing on structure, detail, and the hidden systems that connect living organisms. Earlier work explored circadian rhythms, human physiology, and the relationship between seasonal light and the body. Today, this curiosity has expanded into an investigation of food systems, biodiversity, pollinators, and ecological resilience.

Throughout history, food has connected people to place. Knowledge of gathering, cultivating, preserving, and preparing plants has been passed between generations, often through women’s work and lived experience. These histories of care, cultivation, and food heritage are an important thread within Dijkstra’s practice. Her prints celebrate not only the beauty of plants but also the cultural memory and ecological knowledge they carry.

Working with slow, traditional printmaking techniques — including reduction linocut, woodcut, and mezzotint — she embraces processes that require patience, precision, and trust. The gradual layering of colour and the physical act of carving mirror the rhythms of growth, seasonal change, and the passing of time.

Dijkstra graduated from Ytre Kunstfagskole Ålesund in 2023 and is a member of Aggregat Kunstnerfellesskap in Ålesund, where she continues to develop her printmaking practice. Her work has been exhibited in Norway and internationally, including at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) Summer Exhibition 2024 in the United Kingdom. Her artistic practice has been supported through grants from Møre og Romsdal County and Fjord Municipality.

She continues to develop new work from her studio overlooking the Norwegian fjords, exploring the connections between landscape, biology, cultivation, and the human experience of belonging to a place.