Caroline Kolkman
A rambling sack of mirrors
I am standing in my kitchen. When I bend down over the sink I see it change shape. I know it only does so in my experience, but that does not invalidate this experience itself. I drink some of water and turn to leave the kitchen. As I turn, my memory of the sink moving unfolds and starts to expand. As I walk, the world around me resembles a stage in between scenes. Walls roll back as I step past them, and everything I focus on instantly magnifies and then drops back as I shift my focus, other parts of the house simply disappear when my back is turned. My house became a place where the simple act of seeing shaped my surroundings.
Is it possible to recognize and portray something exactly as it actually exists? Without interference from what and who we are, what we want or how we remember it from before? In ‘A rambling sack of mirrors’, I play with these questions by re-integrating photographs back into the location they were made and then capturing this re-integration in a new photograph. Imposing on what is, with what was. Playing with what is and what could (not) be.
Caroline Kolkman (Amsterdam, 1987) has a master’s in Fine Arts from the St. Lucas School of Arts and a master’s in Photography from the Royal Academy of Arts, both in Antwerp, Belgium. Perception, memory and translation are recurrent themes in Kolkman’s practice. The underlying question is as ancient as it is unanswerable: what is reality? The world as physicists describe it is different from the world we experience individually through our senses. No matter how far science progresses, our perception remains selective, subjective and is ‘stored’ unsteadily in our memory. Because of this, we can never fully know anything: not objects, not others, not ourselves. Kolkman is fascinated by both the troubles we have and the wonders we encounter navigating our shared and separate world(s). Her projects are playful explorations of these subjects.