Katherine Bull transform through creativity

2022 was a year rich with creative fulfilment and adventure. So full, that I have not managed to keep up with updating my blog. So I thought a few words of reflection on the year would be useful before heading full on into 2023.

In February I presented two paintings at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair with 99 Loop Gallery. Reclining Dog and Reclining Cat developed out of a series of small oil sketches I had been making in my studio in which I was reflecting on how domestic animals are presented on social media platforms such as Instagram. There is a strange sense of interspecies connections and projections that go on where I recognise levels of objectification of domestic animals while also recognising my dependance on domestic animals to remind me of how comfortable they can be in their skin. These paintings are strangely confrontational in their scale and I enjoyed how they create sense of discomfort in reminding me of my animalness.

At the end of April I opened a solo exhibition at the AVA gallery in Cape Town. Originally the exhibition was proposed as a shared exhibition of collage and paintings inspired from collage. When my fellow exhibitor had to pull out I decided to use the opportunity to look back on my art making and pair older projects with more recent works.

The exhibition The Pieces That Find Us spanned eighteen years of art making. It was the first time I had brought my digital works (generated from a series of live digital drawing performances 2004-2010) into the same space as my drawings, paintings and collage works ( 2010-). Looking back can often be an uncomfortable experience and there was a level of vulnerability in seeing older works again. Although I work in varying modes and mediums in my art making which can make the work appear disparate; it was rewarding to get feedback from visitors on how they could see themes and threads running through the works on exhibition. There is a congruence in how I continue to explore the nature of perception by foregrounding process; although I have moved from a more analytical towards a more visceral mode of investigation. To honour the original collage focus I incorporated an interactive collage work in the exhibition. Given the same title as the exhibition, The pieces That Find Us consisted of a low platform on the centre of the exhibition where participants were prompted to take a National Geographic magazine at random, close their eyes take a moment with themselves before tearing out a page at random. Opening their eyes and then making a collage from an element that spoke to them from the page. Any remainders of the page were then left in a central pile. I started generate a growing collage from the remains. It was really satisfying to see the set of National Geographic magazines become digested and re-configured during the course of the exhibition. And to see how excited people would get at the permission to create within the exhibition space.

This exhibition was a valuable point of focus and reflection during a busy first half of the year teaching as well as a good way to prepare for my three month residency at the Leipzig International Artists Programme (August - October). The opportunity to spend three months living and working in a big studio space at LIA in the old nineteenth century cotton mill building of the Spinnerei was a unique and enriching experience. The opportunity to share the residency with four other artists, meeting mentors and having monthly studio visits was really fun and engaging. And valuable to get regular fresh feedback on my process. Being situated in a new city also brought the opportunity to do some travelling around Germany. As a group we travelled to Documenta Fifteen and visited Berlin.

Having a break from teaching and other responsibilities was really freeing and opened up more space in my process to explore and experiment. It was also refreshing to get outside my comfort zone and reflect on my process of making as I had to set up a new studio space without my usual tools and materials. I started by setting up some daily meditative drawing practices which I took the time to reflect inwards as a base before starting to look outwards at my new environment. When I travel I often start with visiting the Natural History Museum and the zoo. Although for many years I have been focusing my creative process on exploring the online space and how we orientate ourselves within that environment, my interest in the politics of physical archives and institutions that reflect colonial power structures (incl. zoos) resurfaced on this residency. My interest was sparked by visiting Tamrin in the Natuurkunde Museum, a taxidermied lion of Barbary descent that was the last of a longterm breeding program in the Leipzig zoo.

I discovered that over two thousand lions had been bred in he zoo between 1880 and 2000. This made me wonder about these lions and where they ended up, spread around the zoos and private collections in Europe and beyond. And so began my trail of investigation which took me to various zoos documenting the African and particularly Southern African animals kept in the zoos. When on a residency I often find that you are experiencing and looking at a lot of new environments and it takes a while for all this new data to get processed and filter through into interesting works. So I tried to use painting and drawing as a way to quite literally process my documentation as a first phase. These experiences and documentation informed a series of paintings and interactive works that I presented in an open studio in mid-September.

Inspired by my last two live performances, the interactive collage work and the collaborative focus at Documenta Fifteen, I set up two interactive projects. One was based on my internal investigations documenting my heart beat daily in drawings. I made copies of the drawings and invited visitors to draw what they could see in my heartbeat.

The second interactive work was both a tribute to the 2300 lions bred in captivity in the Leipzig zoo and an invitation to invert the spectacle of the zoo while inviting citizens of Leipzig to reflect on their relationship to lions. Using the medium of clay, visitors to the open studio were invited to create their own lion while blindfolded (children were allowed to look), give them a name and add them to a growing collection of lions (134).

The second half of the residency I continued to research and travel. My investigation led me to visiting the remains of two Cape Lions in the Museum in Wiesbaden and I travelled to the Venice Biennial. I am left with an incredibly rich resource of experience and documentation to filter through and inform my work and teaching for many years to come.

(This residency was made possible by the generous support of the director and team at LIA, The Centre for the Less Good Idea and David Krut Projects.)