When Carla Vermeend enrolled in Focus & Flow with Karen Olson through Take Two, she wasn’t seeking reinvention. She was looking for a way to move forward. A photographer from the Netherlands with decades behind the lens, Carla felt deeply connected to nature but increasingly restricted by the flatness of the medium. She wanted more dimension, more materiality, and a way to give form to her emotional response to the natural world.
Halfway through the course, something shifted. Not in a dramatic, overnight way, but in the quiet realisation that changes everything. “I realised that I can do more with my photographs,” she says. And with that single sentence, the story opens.
Carla has worked in photography for most of her life, professionally for more than twenty-five years. Nature has always been her anchor - forests, the sea, organic structures, atmosphere and mood. Her work is intuitive, guided as much by feeling as by the image itself.
Yet even when the photographs were beautiful, Carla began to sense a limit. The work spoke, but not fully. Something in her wanted to push beyond the surface.
“I was not really connected with my art,” Carla admits. She describes a quiet fatigue - returning to the forest, making the same kinds of pictures, and feeling that something essential was missing. It wasn’t a lack of skill. It was a sense that her creativity was ready for a new shape.
Carla had been thinking about three-dimensional work for some time, but as a photographer, it felt like a difficult leap. Photographs aren’t usually used in sculpture. She didn’t yet know how to bridge the worlds.
Carla began searching for a course inspired by nature - something that would honour her relationship with the landscape and expand her materials. When she discovered Karen Olson’s course through Take Two, it immediately felt aligned.
What stood out was the mix: papermaking, photography, image transfer, and sculptural construction. It wasn’t a course asking her to leave photography behind. It showed her how to carry it forward into form.
“This is really something for me. This is what I want to learn.”
Carla expected to learn new techniques, but what she experienced was bigger than skill-building. The course didn’t merely add options. It removed fear. It gave her permission to experiment, combine, try, and let the work evolve beyond what she could already imagine.
Karen’s approach mattered too. Carla describes her teaching as quiet, sensitive, and generous - structured enough to build confidence yet open enough to allow each student’s style to emerge naturally.
The turning point came when Carla saw how naturally Karen incorporated photographs into paper and sculpture. It wasn’t forced. It felt like a conversation between image and material - one Carla immediately recognised as possible for her own work.
“When I was halfway through the course… I realised that I can do more with my photographs,” she says. For a photographer wanting to move into 3D, that realisation is everything. “This gives me so many more possibilities,” she adds - not only with materials, but also with nature, feeling, and form.
Since completing the course, Carla’s practice has changed dramatically. She no longer sees herself only as a photographer. “I’m not only a photographer anymore,” she says. “I’m also a mixed media artist.”
She has begun incorporating natural materials into her work - paper, fibres, seaweed, cactus linters, and earth pigments - and using photography in ways that feel dimensional and tactile. She creates sculptural objects, paper pieces, and forms that hold imagery rather than simply displaying it.
Just as important is the mindset shift that came with it. Carla absorbed a core permission from the course: experimentation is part of the work. “Try everything. Try what you want. When there’s try and error, well, it’s okay.”
Carla speaks warmly about the structure of the learning experience: the course building progressively, the clarity of Karen’s demonstrations, and the support of the community group. She found inspiration not only from Karen but also from other students experimenting with unexpected natural materials.
One example stayed with her. She began using seaweed to create delicate sculptural surfaces and bowls, learning that fragility can become part of the beauty - sometimes strengthened with paper, sometimes left thin and tender, like nature itself.
One of Carla’s biggest shifts is internal: she now names herself differently. Before the course, she wouldn’t have called herself a mixed-media artist. Now she does, with quiet certainty.
Looking ahead, she describes a broader landscape of possibility: integrating photos with other materials, moving between sculpture and painting, and finding ways to bring nature into the work not only as subject but as substance. “How can I bring my sense of nature… from my heart?” she asks. That question now drives her practice.
Carla is continuing several bodies of work, including a new series using cactus fibres for papermaking and sculptural vessels. She is also returning to her final course project - a jellyfish piece - which she feels is not yet finished.
The jellyfish remains a symbol for her: delicate, fragile, translucent. She wants to explore image transfer on very thin rice paper so the work holds light in a new way. It’s not just an extension of what she made in the course. It’s a deepening.
Carla doesn’t hesitate when asked what she would say to someone considering the course. “I really recommend the course,” she says. She describes Karen as inspiring, professional, and deeply accessible, with a gentle presence and a generous teaching style.
“It is a very rich, meaningful course,” she adds. “I recommend it to everybody who are looking to grow creatively and personally.”
For Carla, that growth was real, not only in what she can now make but also in who she now believes she is as an artist.