For ten years on end, Caroline Waltman has made human-sized, stone sculptures all over the world.
Rather than the definitive sculpture itself, it is the essential aspects of the sculpting process â?? the act of removing or adding material, of opening or closing of material, and other dichotomies - that have retained her interest.
She increasingly often prefers to make the mediating significance of images visible and tangible through works incorporating installations, sound art, graphics, and photography. She achieves the best results in what she calls sculptural, contextual photography.
Intimate and worldly at the same time, her latest book Geboortegrond f.i. contains 164 images that all refer to one other. It is an attempt to create space, to evoke the illusion of fluidity through this static medium. Meanings are overflowing and overlapping throughout the book.
Geboortegrond (Native Soil) can be read in many ways. It does not have just one identity, one reading direction, and one linear descent. Waltman searches for the multiple, the simultaneous, and the changeable. In her photographs, which are mostly pure landscape representations, she seeks to express an open identity, sometimes brought about through a subtle, compositional intervention of her hand. Waltman's photos are like the threads of a weaving that leave the viewer ample room to make new connections and thus increase the space.
The interdependence of the images, which in themselves can and are allowed to assume an incomplete status, is emphasised precisely by the book form that she has chosen.
The un-theatrical structure based on non-hierarchical thoughts and open forms creates mental images and new experiences, both in the maker and in the spectator. There is an ongoing connection of opposites such as strength and vulnerability.
Connections are the main theme in all her works up to now.
Touch remains the sense that she appeals to most strongly, also in her photographs.
Waltmans'photography is like a poetic experience of seeing, connecting and, above all, of feeling forms.
A new reality may arise from it, a reality that is beautiful and mysterious.
