Katrine Køster Holst – Phenomenological Exploration through Clay. Text by Joshua Miller (Princessehof National Museum of Ceramic, Leuwarden, The Netherlands)
Artist and ceramicist Katrine Køster Holst (1979) is a graduate of Design School Kolding, Denmark (1999-2003), Bergen Academy of the Arts, KHiB, Bergen (2003-2006) (Kunstnernes Hus, n.d.). Since earning her MA at Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen in 2006, she has held a number of solo exhibitions as well as participating in collective exhibitions in Norway and Denmark. Her works have been purchased by such institutions as the Nasjonalmuseet and Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum in Norway, where Holst lives and works (TLMagazine, n.d.). Køster Holst also holds a PhD from Oslo National Academy of the Arts, graduating from here in 2019.
Through years of interrogating the medium of ceramics and challenging its creative boundaries, Køster Holst has built up a profound knowledge of her materials. Her practice is built on this and guided by a strong conceptual approach. By it, she has pushed the conceptual potential of the medium of ceramics, looking beyond its functional and purely aesthetic qualities. For her PhD, Holst investigated the potential development of ceramic art through design and crafting techniques utilising basic principles of nature. Basing her project on many years of research in the field prior to her PhD, she performed conceptual and practical surveys of her materials. Three questions became her basic lens of research and analysis. How do landforms grow, move and eventually disappear through slow natural processes like erosion, sedimentation and weathering? What conditions does the core of a form bind to its surface? What is the emotional connection to the landscape about? (Kunstnernes Hus, n.d.)
Holst has written a number of essays on the philosophy underlying her practice, using her experience of the material world around her to illustrate different nuances of it. In these, she describes material processes, the forms they produce and their emotional effect on her in integrated, breathtakingly detailed phenomenological terms. For Holst, material reality is a totality formed by two interconnected processes of reciprocity. Forms are produced by natural forces, which are often cyclical or at least repetitive and continue to affect them over time adinfinitum. On their part, all forms in the context of an environment affect how the forces act upon them as they are changed over time by said forces and the reciprocal cycle repeats thusly. The second process enters the picture with human beings and takes place on an emotional as well as material level. As conscious beings existing within this totality of forms and forces, we are affected by the latter as we perceive it and we reproduce our impressions and the thoughts and feelings they provoke in our actions. Holst does this consciously in her exploration of natural forms and the natural forces that lie behind them.
Holst is concerned with the landscapes, forms and structures produced by this reciprocal totality of forces. She describes them along with the forces that made them the way they are and continue to act upon them, cyclical but never exactly the same from one moment to another. She exemplifies this quite poetically in her essay “Sisyphus,” drawing on a Greek tale of a murderer and blasphemer condemned to spend eternity rolling a boulder uphill to the top of a mountain, where it would invariably roll all the way back to the foot again. The eternal torment of Sisyphus has three basic components: his animate body, the inanimate boulder and the context of the surrounding landscape. The force-based action of rolling the boulder seems utterly repetitive and monotonous. But both forms, along with the nature of the force Sisyphus exerts, are affected by a constant series of natural forces and therefore change all the time. Sisyphus will grow older, the stone will be rounded by more and more iterations. The grooves it leaves behind will deepen with each iteration. The gradient of the slope combined with the changing shape of the stone will affect the shape and dimensions of Sisyphus’s footprints. Holst describes material reciprocity in language as elegant as the works she bases on this philosophy, standing as a testament to the reciprocity of our emotional reaction to the interplay of forces and forms we see around us.
Bibliography
- “Katrine Køster Holst.” Format. https://www.format.no/katrine-kster-holst.
- “Katrine Køster Holst.” Kunstnernes Hus.https://kunstnerneshus.no/en/program/exhibitions/katrine-koster-holst.
- “Ceramics on Site by Katrine Køster Holst at Révélations.” TLmagazine.https://tlmagazine.com/ceramics-on-site-by-katrine-koster-holst-at-revelations/.
- Køster Holst, Katrine. “Sisyphus.” Translated by Christine O’Hagan. Norway: OsloNational Academy of the Arts, 2020.
Related pages:
The Clay and other Essays Publication (2020)
Katrine Køster Holst