Karl Schulze

The emotion of home was self explanatory, until I moved out. Capturing Home began from a fear of change and the feeling of homesickness that followed the first time I left my family home. I wanted to be at university, and I enjoyed being there, but at the same time I missed my hometown, my friends, my family, and the quiet feeling of belonging that comes with being home.

In an attempt to hold on to that feeling, I decided to bring a piece of home with me. I chose the tree in our garden something that had always been there, something that carried years of memories and tried to preserve it in the most detailed way I could imagine. Using a regular office flatbed scanner, I scanned the tree section by section, all the way around, up to a height of about three meters.

The process took time and patience. Every scan became a fragment of memory, a way of documenting something that could never truly be carried with me. The resulting installation presents these scans as a one-to-one representation of my family’s tree. It can be shown true to scale, yet it is also incomplete.

What I captured was not the tree itself, but its memory a distant version of something that continues to live and change elsewhere. Capturing Home reflects on the impossibility of holding on, and the quiet acceptance that every attempt to preserve something meaningful is also an act of letting go.

The work looks at how we try to resist change, even as change shapes who we are. It reminds me that home, like warmth, never really disappears; it simply transforms.