World Fine Art Professionals and their Key-Pieces, 505 - Caroline Schröder

World Fine Art Professionals and their Key-Pieces, 505 – Caroline Schröder
At the PAF, the Photographers Art Fair in Loods 6 in Amsterdam I saw special work by Caroline Schröder, including diptychs. Two different images next to each other that together had something to say. It reminded me of Italian frescos.
I made an appointment with her and visited her in a former school in Bussum, a beautiful building surrounded by a plant and vegetable garden that was bordered on the outside by a natural fence of long branches, probably willow branches.

The vulnerable in society
She has a spacious room with a white couch, large green leafy plants, and her own works on the cupboard and on the wall. I see the diptychs there. I also see elongated sculptures that look like African sculptures. We drink good strong coffee and Caroline tells.
She studied at the St. Joost Art Academy in Breda. In the third year of St. Joost she was mostly occupied with photography and film, but at the Graphics Department she felt much more freedom in choosing all kinds of other disciplines. For example, she learned about different etching techniques and bookbinding. At the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam she was able to do a special project with heliogravures. “A very complex photographic etching technique.” The elaborations of this were shown at her final exam exhibition next to her self-portraits and documentary portraits from Poland.
After graduating as a documentary portrait photographer, she stayed in Breda for a while and already had it in her head that she wanted to do more with photography than just portraits.
Initially, she focused mainly on people from vulnerable groups, she says. “I went to countries like Russia, Poland, Bulgaria to portray elderly people and psychiatric patients in nursing homes and charities. That was right after I had finished the Academy, St. Joost Academy, Department of Photography and Film, in Breda. In Moscow and other places I slept among the people I photographed. It was pro bono, only the travel and accommodation were paid for. I came to Burgas in Bulgaria via the municipality of Rotterdam, which had adopted an elderly project there. I have always been touched by the vulnerable in society.”

Series
She participated in photo projects that were announced as ‘open calls’ by municipalities and provinces, sometimes approached them separately from a project and made one series after another. Usually with a large-format camera. For Amsterdam, a series about young people at the beginning of their puberty (‘Too hot to handle’), and also projects for the city of Utrecht, Amersfoort and the province of Noord-Brabant. “For Amsterdam, I captured the inner world of teenagers, including how they like to be portrayed. For Amersfoort, I captured the ‘servants’, the countless invisible volunteers, both children and adults. The Netherlands is a country of volunteers.” The close-ups were displayed on large billboards in various places in the city of Amersfoort.
In the meantime, she was pregnant with her first son. He was born with a serious illness and died – after an illness – within six months. “We lived in the hospital for most of that time. Wolf-Job was a special child; Job – because of our trust in him no matter what would happen, Wolf – because of the solo path he took through his illness.” Her son’s funeral was embedded in rituals, “non-church but from our hearts.”

From outer world to inner world
Already in Amersfoort she got the idea that she was mainly concerned with the outer world and she started to find that too limited. ‘I don’t want to be in the outer world anymore, I want to stay in my inner world’. That’s when her spatial works came into being. “Photography is finished. That came to me spontaneously during a long journey in which I collected all kinds of objects: all kinds of wood, stones, shells and also broken shoes.”
With an extra backpack she took the collected items home. “At that time I had a studio-house on the monastery grounds of the monastery City of God (Stad Gods). I started making things from all those materials. They became small statues grafted onto African art, there was always a person to be recognized in one way or another. The damage caused by life (wind and rain) also kept coming back. I tried to portray my inner world in this way.”

Pilgrimages
Then she became seriously ill. “I had a tumor in my head. I had surgery for that later. Then another tumor was added, benign, but difficult to operate on. That put life on edge for me. My life partner Hapé, photographer and publisher, said: ‘You have always wanted to do a pilgrimage. You have to do it now.’ I wondered: can I do that? He said: ‘Go, if you are too tired, you will go home.’ I left and started in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the beginning of the 1000 kilometer Santiago route. It was a liberation.”
‘You have to take pictures,’ said Hapé. She couldn’t collect any beautiful materials now, but she could capture special places with a photo. She had bought a small Leica compact camera. Her second son Ischa was old enough in the meantime that she could take a break. “I took a lot of pictures during the trip. I started to enjoy walking. When you walk for a long time, nature starts to speak to you. I started to portray that in the photos.” She had gotten the taste for it. After that, she did more than ten pilgrimages: in Scotland, Italy (the Franciscus path, the Michaels path), Spain and large parts of Canterbury – Rome. “I thought: this is part of me. I have become a pilgrim.” She still does 1 or 2 pilgrimages every year. ‘But I also had to be there for Hapé and my son Ischa.’
She had a lot of photos by now. In Italy she captured the leaves on the ground, the sand on the earth and details of a Madonna. In churches, monasteries and museums she came across icons. It reminded her of her childhood when she was an altar girl. “Holy water, ringing the bell, helping with weddings and funerals. A familiar feeling.”

Feminist mother
Caroline grew up with a feminist mother who was focused on the outside world. “What was important to her was: being strong, making a career by building a bunker around yourself, so to speak. As a child, I was quite sensitive, with a big inner imagination, I loved fairy tales, collected things from nature.” Her mother helped Russian refugees in their hometown of Arnhem. As a thank you, she received a painted egg and icons during Easter – a big celebration for the Russians. “Our house was covered in icons. I came across those icons in Italy. I saw them in churches and monasteries in triptychs, six-part and eight-part paintings. So impressive. When I got home, I knew what I wanted to do with my work. Combining images of nature and Madonnas with nature in triptychs. There is a ritual act in triptychs. You open it, you close it, from an outside world you go to an inner world. I entered my own inner world. And wanted to show what was living inside me.”
In the ZIN monastery in Vught she stayed for a few months in a guest studio. “A large studio, formerly a large barn. I could also live there. It was conceived by Wim Verschuren, prior of the Brothers of Charity. Nowadays it is a place of contemplation for retreats. You work there for a few months and as a thank you you hand in a work of art. I made triptychs there, from large to small. I further elaborated them in my own studio. The stay in Vught worked like a kind of pressure cooker.”
After Vught she went looking for other guest studios abroad. “I have just spent a month in Florence, in 2023 I spent two months in the South of France. It is always a period of one month / five weeks. In the South of France I made spatial work. The studio was near the mountains, with my backpack on I started collecting materials and at the end of the afternoon I would display them on the veranda and assemble them. Sometimes I would work it out further in the home studio. In Florence I mainly took photographs. I took more than 7000 photos there. I will continue with that in the diptychs.”

What is her central theme?
“It is about being human. Who are you as a human being? How can you develop as a human being? It is about the dignity of a vulnerable human being. But also: what do you do with your life? The project ‘Ideals’ that I made for the province of Noord-Brabant was about the war. What were your ideals before and after the war. What do you do with all the experiences from the war, what choices do you make because of that, I find that very fascinating.”
Now she is working on the diptychs and is investigating the elements of desires and sorrow. “I want to show the development of my inner world. There is also darkness in it. In our super-Catholic family, darkness was not discussed. No light enters a bunker. I would like to bring light into the bunker and show what is essential in life.
By acknowledging your own dependency you meet each other and get intimacy, appreciation for diversity and recognition of your own mortality and vulnerability. With my mother there was no room for curiosity, she built a bunker around herself. That is a denial of many aspects of being human.
Curiosity is a great asset: researching, exploring new paths, being in the dark. Not knowing what the next project will be. I keep trying to reinvent myself in my work. What is the inner world, do I dare to show that completely?”

Sources of inspiration
She names a number of sources of inspiration: fairy tales and mythological stories, African art, art that has darkness. And as artists Kiefer, Armando, Picasso and Frida Kahlo.
“Picasso’s Guernica is a work of art that touched me. I want to get to the bottom of things, and I live with death with a tumor in my head. In the Western world, there is little room for dying well and being buried well. Death is very close, it is a friend who is close to me. Armando was obsessed with the Second World War, for me it is much smaller. I have learned to live with a lost child, learned to live with illness. The dark is very familiar to me. Darkness is also the light in death. Bob Dylan wrote and sang ‘The lamp of my soul, and you torch up the night’. I believe in that. That you can let the light shine within yourself. From a young age I thought: there is no total darkness. I want to let my light shine right through the darkness. What inspires me about Frida Kahlo: the smaller her room for movement became, the bigger her inner world. In the end, she herself became the work of art.”
Key work
She has key works in every phase of her work. In the triptychs it is the first work in the series ‘The inner face’. In the diptychs it is also the first work. “The hand of the child, his deep desire for connection. In the spatial work ‘Pas de deux’, a work in which man dances with death.”

Method
She doesn’t work according to a plan. “If I do, it goes completely wrong. I want to work from curiosity and surprise. I want to surprise myself.” Silence is essential to her, she says. “While traveling, when I’m working. I also work on weekends. Silence helps me a lot to explore my own world. I photograph in the same way as I collect materials: intuitively. I’m a beachcomber. In Florence I photographed a leaf on the street, a piece of a zebra crossing, a worn doorknob. My eye is drawn to it and I capture it. I store the photos in the archive. I go through them later. If an image touches me again, I start working with it.”
The diptychs also come about intuitively. “I put individual photos on the table. I attach them to pieces of cardboard. The two photos start a conversation with each other. It becomes a minuscule story. It is an endless puzzle, searching for the right combinations of images, that is only finished when the feeling behind the story is right.
And then the elaboration in materials: What would it be like if I were to hang that on the wall? I had this worked out by a fine carpenter Ellenmarie van Gentevoort.” I see various diptychs hanging on the wall. “This is just the beginning. It has to become a large series. I want to work more and more abstractly. From the figurative to the abstract. The diptych can stand and you can also hang it up. Like a small book. Some images are more hidden. Then the diptych only opens up a little.”
Spirituality
In the triptychs in particular, you see her connection with spirituality. “Life is a miracle. There is something that is immensely greater than what you see. Call it God, call it nature. It obliges us to humility. After the Enlightenment, we started to see ourselves as the kings of the universe. But we are actually debutants, grains of sand. If you realize that, you place man in a better framework. We can’t control anything at all. Our son Ischa is studying ecology and hydrology. It’s about the sustainability of the earth. He said that as a result of the possible melting of the ice cap, not one but several tipping points could emerge. Scientists don’t know where it’s going. Great scientists like Newton and Einstein realized the limits of science.”

Philosophy
Finally: what is her philosophy, if that is not already clear?
“You can only look at what is happening and anticipate it. That is the essence of life. Not: how do I get a grip on life, but: how do I move through life as well as possible. If you are highly sensitive, fear is lurking. It is about not being overcome by it. That you observe it and can create light through it.
In my work I actually bring together a number of elements, a number of small stories. In diptychs, triptychs, and combinations of metal, wood and grass. I am always busy making combinations, mini-stories, so that a layering arises.
I try to let it grow from the unconscious. I have learned: I have to follow everything that catches my eye and let go of the idea that it has to be about something.”
Image 3: Caroline Schröder

https://carolineschroder.nl/
https://paf.photography/fotografen/caroline-schroder/
https://www.instagram.com/carolineschroder.kunst/
https://inzaken.eu/2025/01/03/caroline-schroder-ik-moet-alles-volgen-waar-mijn-oog-op-valt-en-loslaten-dat-het-ergens-over-moet-gaan/