Artist Statement, April 2023

      Multidisciplinary and consistently experimental, my practice engages with a range of mediums, exploring textiles, film, photography, sound, sculpture, installation and painting. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror being contextually foundational to my inquiry, I seek to entertain my fascination with the unclean, the rejected, the taboo and the conventionally confidential; inspecting and encouraging, at times tongue-in-cheek, the vortex of unorthodox pleasures that reside deep within the human conscience. From these concerns stems a particular interest in creating sensations of simultaneous attraction and repulsion within the viewer, through appealing materialities, textures and sounds that allude to things that the mind would tend to retract from. This year, I have found myself drawing attention to these binaries through processes and materials such as bodily waste, fibres, cultivating fungi/mould, ASMR [1] and sound. 

     My exploration of typically ‘abject’ subject matters began through photography with Rejectamenta (2022-23), a series documenting bodily waste, toilet and bathroom scenes, food, mould and found faeces, which has remained an ongoing exercise since. The camera here becomes an instrument to aid my zealously sensuous relationship with the rejected, converting the gross into an aesthetic experience. Using analogue for its subtle imperfections, as well as the ambience and anticipation created between taking the photo and seeing the results. Infact, As I watched my mothers body attack itself the camera reconfigured (a Delicate Body, 2022) and the analogue lended itself again to generate an intimate and gentle space of nurture, reframing her dejected circumstance with significance and liberation; giving the pain a tinge of worth by producing a tender series that encapsulates this fragile body. While Rejectamenta unfolded, so did the urge to assess how bodily waste could be a medium without the camera. 

      Incidentally, 2022-23 saw myself undergoing the vicissitudes of a sensory-urinary-sensitivity issue, meaning urination was constant and often occurred in medical tubes. Investigating my own persistent waste produced Study of Piss I (2023), a sculptural work consisting of test tubes filled with my urine, which I exhibited alongside a film and soundscape (Emicition, 2023) developed from its making, in Foot in The Door [2]. The sculpture itself only fulfils its desired role as ‘affector’ when viewed with no ‘screen’[3], so exhibiting it was critical to my investigation of the tensions between psychological binaries; repulsion and attraction came in the forms of curiosity and disgust when confronted with the yellow liquid. With inspiration from Lucy Beech’s film Reproductive Exile (2018) and the words written by Naomi Pearce regarding it [4], Emicition attempts a play with visceral sensation by combining opposing audio and image, such as urine being poured with sounds of swallowing. As a result, I watched, with humour and accomplishment, the viewers squirm and laugh at these bizarre and uncomfortable pairings. Collecting my urine presented me with the opportunity to create a self-growing-abject-micro-ecosystem from my own waste, resulting in Study of Piss II & III (2023) which documents how the sculpture autonomously transformed over two months. They existed in those states only at the time of documentation, as the ungovernable relationship between time and organic matter surrenders the work to natural development, establishing parallels with the conditions of ‘land art’ iterated in a miniature fabricated environment.

     After happening upon these mould-related sculptures, I became aware of decomposers as a generalised thematic niche in the artworld from research into Serpentine General Ecologies. It enticed me to investigate the mould in my sculpture with renewed attention: Piss Microcosms I & II (2023) (taken two months apart) use digital photography to allow for the degree of detail needed to aptly capture the textures I could see. The images taken from above acquire abstract qualities, highlighting the circular shape's connotations towards the idea of a ‘world’ glimpsed through an orifice. Whereas images taken from the side offer a more documentary approach and display the mould almost like an embryonic growth. The concept of an embryo establishes a dichotomy between birth and decay when pitched against the idea of a microcosm: a starting life and a decaying world contained in a tube of piss. The rotting excremental matter inside a test tube seemed to humorously juxtapose this ‘sterile-medical’ aesthetic and the ‘white cube’ background. Having just experienced Magdalena Abakovicz’s [5] gripping textile works, it only made sense to return to my tufting and textile practice after observing the woolly [6] textures of the mould. Carrying out experiments using fibres, wool and fabrics, I created forms visually reminiscent of Caroline Achaintre’s work. They became tactile surfaces in which the source idea of the mould transformed from an originally-abject thing into something that invites touch and interaction, an approach motivated by Anni Albers evaluation of tactility [7]. The allusion to sound in the General Ecologies podcast [8] made me wonder: How might a ‘decomposed’ soundscape replicate the tactility and sensibility that I had been chasing in my textile work? Thus, I began producing a Euphony of Haptic Decay (2023), an immersive installation. In the process of its growth I felt like a spectator, watching the development of the fibres and textiles that constitute this amalgamated biome.  

Catalina King, April 2023.

F o o t n o t e s

[1] Informed by The Design Museum's exhibition WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD: The World of ASMR, visited in February 2023.

[2] RSA Interim Exhibition , February 2023.

[3] Concept of the screen explored by Foster, H. (1996). Obscene, Abject, Traumatic.

[4] ‘Liquid seeps, oozes gushes and floods. It leaves bodies as piss or blood... half submerged, rocking in a sea of liquid... the colour of morning wee,’ Pearce, Naomi. ‘Trying to Conceive: Reproductive Exile’. De La Warr Pavilion, n.d., 2, McGuffin.

[5] Seen in Magdalena Abakovicz’s, Every Tangle of Thread and Rope (2023) at Tate Modern, visited in the beginning of March 2023.

[6] Mould defined as: ‘a superficial often woolly growth.’ CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTILLERY FUNGUS, Dr. S. M. Douglas.

[7] Albers, Anni. Tactile Sensibility. On Weaving: New Expanded Edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018, pp. 44-47.

[8] Quoted in the epigraph to this statement taken from General Ecology: The Story of The Understory of The Understory (2021) Serpentine Podcast.