Karin Oldershausen

It Takes Courage

IT TAKES COURAGE TO LEAVE This series revolves around the different rooms to which we are tied, in our minds and in real space. It is also concerned with the rooms we cross and inhabit in space and time, and the tension between mind space and real space and how these two spaces interact when we look at a photograph or go into nature. For this series Karin v. Oldershausen went rambling through her immediate surroundings and she realised how much the landscape was composed of a variety of rooms, in each of which different animals, insects and plants lived. Boundaries and thresholds between rooms are very attractive, they are tantalising places where something when stepped over might happen, fascinating places might reveal themselves. But to leave a familiar room is perhaps one of the most courageous actions one can perform. From the day we go to school for the first time and leave home, we keep leaving rooms. And one day we realise that we are also tied to mental rooms. Karin von Oldershausen takes photographs of the thresholds to different natural habitats, the fringes of the wood, the reed, the grassland. Behind the threshold there is a hidden room and a story which is not available to the eyes. A second photograph on the right shows the threshold we can never reach: The horizon, where our imagination is free to imagine what lies behind. The viewer is invited to move from one mental space to the other, from a rigid, bound to a place, tight state of mind to a free one. Mental room joins the physical room: It takes courage to leave our mental space. What also struck her was that the thresholds were peaceful and silent places, familiar places, mysterious places, between light and dark. They felt like ambiguous places of transition, from life to death. And again: It takes courage to die.

Photographer

Karin Oldershausen

Karin von Oldershausen focuses on the tension between mind space and real space and how these two spaces interact, when we look at a photograph, step into rooms or go into nature.
In a time dominated by images, do we always know where the real space is? And is there such a thing?
Rooms and spaces, especially in nature, have become one of her favorite subjects, how do we behave when we go into nature and how much do we see and develop awareness of nature’s rooms.
In her landscape photographs she tries to shed a light on this topic and show how much nature, a vast common room in which we move, is home to us.
And then there is Time. Often while walking into the vast space of a solitary landscape, we have the illusion of escaping Time. But in a landscape Time is omnipresent, we are confronted with ongoing processes whose end we will never experience: We belong to time and nature.

There are many disturbing aspects in natural spaces, which she describes in her photographs, where landscapes become mind spaces and roads lead to far horizons, beyond which our minds are free to imagine. Wood fringes are places of transition, ponds and meadows home to an ever self renewing cycle of life and death.

Karin von Oldershausen lives with her family in Hamburg, Germany.
Her works have been on shown in Berlin: Deutsche Bank Ernst Reuter Platz, 2019, Sweden: Gallery 11, Melby/Kivik 2019, and at Flo Peters Gallery in Hamburg 2019, GUP Fresh Eyes Talent 2021

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