A Sydney-based artist with a practice focusing on photography, video and sculpture, Valentina Schulte’s work focuses primarily on the urban and natural landscapes we inhabit and how these places affect our conscious experience. This interest in place arose from previous projects centred on travel and the flaneur, which questioned how and why we seek new horizons and experiences in order to give meaning to our lives.
More recently, Schulte has developed an interest in a new area of research – one that explores the human impact on the lived landscape and the natural environment. Within this, a specific focus on the individual characteristics of the natural landscape while touching on the mythologies and symbolism nurtured and honoured by our ancestors and how this feeds into our modern lives.
While the central theme in her work is humanity within the landscape, Schulte’s newest works explore some of the ideas of circadian rhythms, sacred geometry and geometric patterns, beauty in small details, terraforming, positive and negative space and finally the bending of nature to our will.
At this critical point in Earth’s history, we are seeing more people concerned by the human effect on the environment, questioning their place within the landscape. With every new discovery our species makes, expanding out knowledge in science and technology we strive to build a better world for humanity to survive into the future. As part of this it her belief that it is important to retain and encourage a connectedness to nature and it is through her newest works that she endeavours to highlight and celebrate this belief.
Schulte’s work has been shown in galleries, institutions, artist run spaces and award shows around Australia as well as internationally in solo and group exhibitions in the USA, Norway, United Kingdom and Spain. Most recently showed a selection of works at the inaugural Sydney edition of The Other Art Fair for emerging artists in 2015, was a 2016 finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award for Photography and awarded overall winner for the 2017 CLIP Award for contemporary landscape photography at the Perth Centre for Photography.