As part of this residency, he continues to explore clay and different ways of making pottery, something he did, making Adobe bricks and embroidered works, for a joint exhibition with Khadim Ali last year at the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth. A book published following the exhibition also contains poetic writing by Katki.
Words are an important creative material for the artist who completed a master’s in creative writing from Victoria University in 2022.
“I would say that I work with poetry as a craft more than any other craft. I am reading and writing and I’m also painting a fair bit. One of the series of paintings I’m producing right now is in response to a poet who responded to another poet who responded to another poet.”
A fascination with the poetics and aesthetics of art and archaeology is one of the abiding themes in Katki’s work. However, the word “archaeology” has for him uncomfortable associations with the destructive plunder of archaeological sites in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Craft, however, is something he embraces in the widest meaning of the word, applying it to every aspect of the creative process.
“Everything done with respect and love is craft, from the conception of the idea to the execution of it to the fabrication of it, and then the installation of it. I think that contrasts with the way archaeology was treated. It wasn’t necessarily done with the best of intentions for the people whose culture had been excavated. It wasn’t done with love. It was done with a very colonial, very capitalistic, acquisition-based [attitude].”
The politics of sexual, cultural, personal and colonised identities are themes throughout his work in which he values the dispossessed and reconnects with their, and his, own origins.
One month into the residency in Whanganui he says he loves the relationship the town has with the river and is interested in exploring local materials to work with. He has planted herbs in the raised bed for residents at Tylee Cottage, which he may incorporate in different uses of clay and pottery making.
“I’m also exploring the relationship with early childhood and places such as the various kitchens in which I was raised by the women of the family – and the culture of cooking, care, nurture and the pedagogies of care that are rooted in cooking, embroidery, knitting - non-masculine, non-patriarchal approaches to raising a child.”