BY SANNE KABALT
How and why did you become a photographer?
ELISE SCHOUMAN - (ES) As long as I can remember I have been working on different things. I made paintings, bags from recycled material, poems and things like tables and closets. Somewhere around my tenth birthday I started to make photographs. An analog camera was my birthday present and that was the start for me to see everything with a different view, to frame the world and focus on little things such as differences in light and shadow. I never thought that I would become an artist or photographer. I always wanted to be somebody who can change the world; I wanted to do something good for the world. So I started to study social work. After two years and lots of frustration I made the choice to change my study. I think it is the best choice of my life to have studied at the art academy.
Tell us about your educational path. What are your best memories of your studies? What was your relationship with photography at that time?
ES - My best memories are of the moments when we talked about photography, about the image itself. And it was great to make lots of work, often in a short period of time. The students around me made me focus on photography only. The important thing is that you have enough ideas and the spirit to improve yourself and to try to find the best in yourself.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about going to school again, following a new course and learning new things to get better at what I do and get more responses from other people, more critical opinions, more of everything.
© Elise Schouman, from the series ‘Nothing is made to last forever’, dried butterfly 2012
Is there any teacher or fellow artist that has allowed you to better understand your work?
ES - Artist and teacher Petra Stavast was a very important person for me during my time at the academy, she made me look at my work in a critical way. Another teacher and also a great artist, Jan Adriaans, helped me to learn to create chaos and to explore my own limits. From that chaos I found a new starting point, a blank slate for me as an artist. This has brought me to many discoveries.
How would you describe your work in general? What kind of photographer are you?
ES - I am a maker, a creator. It always starts with little things, for example a shadow, a frown on somebody’s face. Words that I read in books or just see on the way back home. This can all trigger a story, or a thought to make something with. The story starts with a reaction and slowly I will build the walls and frames of a new work. I am an observer. I’m trying to understand the things around me. I’m trying to confuse the things around me. My photographs are poetic. The last few years I’ve been dealing with questions on finiteness and infinity. I really like the transience of things. Things will get ruined; white paper will get yellow in the sun after a while. And there is also an attraction to nature in my photographs; the overwhelming power of nature is something that affects me.
© Elise Schouman, from the series ‘Verdicht’ (‘Fiction’), 2014
When I look at your work a quick summary of what I see would be: humans relating to nature. Is it your aim to make the viewer think about this relationship?
ES - The relationship between men and nature is exiting for me; there is something dishonest to it. Humans think they are smarter than everything else on earth, but I think this isn’t true. This thought is present in my work, but I wouldn’t want to impose this on the viewer.
Lately I was thinking; what if the universe decided that men destroys and poisons their planet. Then the universe reacts with natural disasters to show men their rightful place within the universe. I feel very connected to nature. It gives me a very magical and safe feeling. A tree will be never the same; the air is the energy that gives me most ideas.
Your work has always been poetic. In recent years you have also started to write poems and combine words with images. Can you tell us about this development and how it works for you?
ES - By writing I get the feeling that I can give my thoughts a home. Since I was young I have been writing in diaries and writing little poems. For a long time I did all this writing only for myself, which is what you do with a diary; it was just a way to order my thoughts. At the moment it takes up more space in my work as an artist. I combine image with text and investigate their relation with each other.
On the sky terrace calls the cuckoo
Distant streams rustle without interruptionOn the edges, pious berries go astray
They will always find waterHigh, along the ravine, white wolves are running
Where they live, you’ll never comeThey find their way through the pure land
In the meters tall trees, the wind sighs.Elise Schouman, Borsec, May 2014
© Elise Schouman, from the series ‘Vergeet betekenis’ (‘Forgot meaning’), 2011
In your poems and texts you often suggest what we see is not real, an imagined reality. Would you prefer the viewer to see your work as truth or as fiction?
ES - I think there is no real truth, which also means that everything is the truth, or could be. The same goes for my photography; it is not the truth but it could be the truth. For me it is often the truth, and perhaps some people who read the poems may find the truth there.
I always try to get a better grip on what I actually write. Something that began with just a couple of words, with a very small idea or only just one image, grows to something bigger. By gathering information, texts and images, you create a fertile soil where beautiful things can sprout.
You have made a body of work during a residency in Borsec, Romania. Can you tell us about the residency and your work there?
ES - A place, a beautiful place deep in the forests nestled between the mountains of Romania, that provides space for artists and writers to work. I spent two weeks there, walking through the woods, climbing the mountains. I had an encounter there. An encounter with myself, with nature and with the people who were not there, but who’s absence was visibly present. This encounter I photographed. The beginning of the unknown.
© Elise Schouman, from the series ‘An encounter’, 2014
Can you give us an insight in your day-to-day working life? Do you spend most of your time in your studio or out photographing or doing other things? Do you have any rituals that help you to be creative and productive?
Every week I have three days to work on my photography, writing and so on. These days I like to start early, first with everything that has to be done on the computer, like writing, contacts and photo editing. In the course of the day I go out and I walk often, or I take the bike and I let the wind order all my thoughts, until everything has a place. Then I come back and usually write. Ideas often come through movement, by looking, by forgetting that you want to think of something; that brings out the best ideas.
In your opinion, what is the hardest part about being a photographer? And what is the best part?
The best thing is that you get the possibility to develop your creative mind. From there you can create whatever you want. It is important to make time to empty your mind in order to create. This, for me, is freedom.
The hardest thing is that what you create is really personal. To show the depths of your inner being can be quite scary, like being naked on a stage. But I think when you show your work to the world and people have an opinion about it, it also learns you to grow as an artist.
Can you recommend a book, movie or exhibition that has been a source of inspiration to you?
The movie ‘De Zee die Denkt’ (The Sea that Thinks), is one of the best movies I have seen. The film revolves around the question ‘who are you?’; a really interesting question with more depth than it seems at first. Also the narrow bridge between what is real and what is illusion makes you look at the world slight differently.
Poems by Fernando Pessoa are a great inspiration for me.
Artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Gerard Richter are artists who made a great impression on me. I recently saw their work in an exhibition in Weserburg, a museum for modern art in Bremen. The title of the exhibition was ‘Land in sicht’, it was a really good combination of different artists. It was all about landscape, in a realistic way and also in a really abstract way. It was a great inspiration for me because of the tension between nature and the artist, between nature and the way you look at nature.
What projects are you currently working on and what are your plans for the future?
At the moment I am starting a project tilted ‘A Dream’. The dream is a window through which you can take a look into another world that in the normal waking consciousness is not accessible. In the future I want to write even more, to try to get better at it. Maybe someday I will write a book. I am always busy with little projects, such as a self-built camera, which sometimes grow into bigger projects. That’s what I like to do best.