Hannah Schemel

Hannah Schemel (1994) is a German-born artist, who studied communication design at the University of Mannheim and is currently finishing her MA in Milan, Italy. Alongside her studies, she has been working as an independent artist, exhibiting her works all over Germany. In her photography practice, Schemel focuses on the passing of time and its interaction with subjects from the natural world, such as the sea, the sky and the forest. She engages with and records these motifs with great appreciation and admiration for hours or even days, spending her time in a chosen spot, perceiving sounds, wind and the movement around her. The artist has been developing two long-term projects, kigen (the origin) and umi (the sea), in which she traces the origin of places either through provenance in the Black Forest or the sea of Quiberon. Influenced by the philosophy of Zen and Japanese poetry, Schemel focuses on the concept of light and shadow, the understanding of nature and the tea ceremony both aesthetically and in terms of content. Her work is about the conscious reduction of the spontaneously experienced, reduced to the essential, leaving room for thoughts and experiences of the viewer. The recordings of the world around Schemel, almost detached from the passing of time, are symbiotically complemented by the masterful craftsmanship and the exquisite quality of material, turning every picture into a unique one. The photographer works with an analogue large format camera and creates her photographs using hand-made paper especially developed for her, into which she lets her motives sink using a platinum-palladium mixture technique with a delicate Japanese paint brush made of goat hair.

In 2020, Hannah Schemel won the advancement award for photography of the Heinrich-Vetter foundation and the city Mannheim.