Caitlin Schumacher's practice embodies the premise from which she lives — that love is the generative force creating everything: the planets, the stars, water, animals, humans, giggles, tears, sorrow, shame, blood, paint, the frequency of a note, a thought, a word. All of it, fundamentally the same energy, infinitely expressed. She calls this Love in All Its Frequencies — LIAIF — naming not only her project, but her method and her way of being in the world.
Love not limited to the small, sentimental notions of the love of popular culture, this is infinite love, indefinable by nature, love that can and will destroy all that has become separated from love, so that it can become love again. It is chaos and tenderness, grief and ecstasy, darkness and light — all of it moving in the same direction, toward unity.
Painting, singing, composing with this understanding, she enters any creative process with prayer, and a vow to surrender to love. Dancing, drumming the canvases with her brushes, singing as she paints, using her body as the instrument, an open invitation for LIAIF to create through her. Following instinct, adding colour, soaking the canvas with water, scraping back, waiting, beginning again and again. What arrives on the canvas is not preconceived. It is received.
Her large-scale abstractions are built from vinyl paint, graphite, woody pastel, chalk, crystal pigments on canvases infused with essential oils chosen for their charge — frankincense, spikenard, rose, ylang ylang — each carrying the residue of a specific history. To bring them into the work is to reclaim them: to run what was done to the body back through the body, and find it transformed. Although abstract, the work is deeply personal, every mark charged with the full extent of her lived experience – nothing is withheld. What moves through the artist's body in the making is often unbearable. What arrives on the canvas is beauty. She has come to understand this as the meaning of alchemy: it is through allowing, that lead becomes gold. In a world drowning in pain it cannot process, reason through, justify or repair, she offers this possibility — when we turn towards what is here, transformation occurs.
What distinguishes the work most consistently is its Rorschach-like perceptual quality — a field in which the viewer's own perception completes what the painting began. Faces, figures, and forms move in and out of legibility. Every viewer finds something different; what they find changes each time they look. Schumacher has stood beside her own finished canvases and been shown, by first-time viewers, things and meaning she had never seen in them herself. The paintings, in this sense, are never complete. They remain alive — still moving, still channeling, becoming uniquely personal in the eye of each beholder, in perpetuity.
Schumacher is currently developing a collaborative body of work, Close To Me, made in dialogue with fellow musicians. Improvised jam sessions are recorded and brought into her atelier in Berlin, where they become the sonic environment within which the paintings are channeled.
Caitlin Schumacher is an Australian artist of Irish heritage, based in Berlin. Working professionally as a musician, songwriter, and producer since 2001, she began painting in 2017 — finding in the canvas a form that could create even more from what needed to move through her. She has exhibited in Berlin at LOBE Block (solo, 2024), the UDK Summer University in collaboration with M3 Gallery (group, 2023), and Backhaus Projects (group, 2023). Her work is held in private collections in Berlin, London, New York, Los Angeles, Dubai, Reykjavik, Lisbon, Malmö, Amsterdam, Wellington and Sydney. She is represented online by Singulart.