Lin Gerritse is a Dutch visual artist born in 1988. He underwent heart surgery at the age of two. During the operation, his heart was stopped for 56 minutes while his blood was circulated by a machine. He remembers almost nothing of the surgery itself, but every two years he returns for heart check-ups.

There he lies on the examination table, watching his own heart on a monitor, seeing the valves open and close while hearing the rhythmic sounds of the echo.

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This experience became a starting point in his artistic practice and led Gerritse to investigate the human body true visual art.

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Gerritse works with sculpture, installation, sound installation, performance, collage, drawing, and photography. The main project within his practice is Het Vruchtlichaam / The Fruiting Body, a series of sculptures of human bodies made from biological materials that contain mushroom spores. From these bodies, living mushrooms grow.

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The sculptures form themselves through the growing mushrooms, which take on different shapes, colours, structures, and smells. In this way the sculptures shape themselves in an autonomous way.

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Gerritse often thinks about what happens when a body is returned to nature. If we die and our bodies are placed in a forest, the forest would slowly absorb them. Plants, mushrooms, and flowers would grow from the body, insects would consume the flora and fauna, birds would eat the insects, and foxes would eat the birds. In this way, the body becomes part of the forest again. In the eyes of nature there is no hierarchy between humans, plants, or mushrooms everything is part of the same cycle.