Osmotic Murmur
On Kathrin Köster’s eponymous series of works
By Linnéa Bake
A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
As sculptural objects, Kathrin Köster’s ceramic works – variously shaped, bulbous hollow bodies that appear organic in their irregularity – refer to their inherent function: they are vessels. The first tool was a container, as Ursula K. Le Guin writes in her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, in which she argues in favour of establishing the “carrier bag”– representative of a thing that can contain something else – as the starting point for an alternative narration of human cultural history.1 In her essay, baskets, bags and vessels serve Le Guin as the silent protagonists of a story that was (and in its contemporary form still is) all too often dominated by the louder narrative of the mammoth-hunting hero and his spear. With her Carrier Bag Theory, the science fiction author and theorist Le Guin (1929-2018) countered the promethean-technological progress utopias of her time, instead establishing the container for gathering or carrying as a representation of a form of technology aimed at community, cooperation and the preservation of life.
In both materiality and shape, Köster’s sculptures from the series Osmotisches Flüstern (“Osmotic Murmur”) (2023) are inspired by the so-called “olla” (Spanish for pot or cauldron) – a porous, unglazed clay jug that is buried in the ground to act as a watering system for plantations and gardens. As an ancient irrigation method with a history dating back up to 2000 years, ollas could indeed be considered possible protagonists of a narrative as suggested by Le Guin. In employing the porous, semi-permeable property of single-fired clay, they efficiently supply plants with water: compared to conventional irrigation methods, around fifty to seventy percent of water can be saved by making use of the physical process of osmosis, which balances the concentration gradient of water on both sides of a semi-permeable membrane. Emulating the functionality of the terracotta vessels – buried deep in the ground, they do not require supporting bases and are usually round or tapered at the lower end – Kathrin Köster’s sculptures take on various forms: small and spherical, with convex or concave edges or with long protruding limbs, the hollow bodies always exhibit one or more openings similar to a bottleneck. As objects, they resemble fictitious organs that could be connected to a vascular network, nodes of an imaginary rhizomorphic structure, or perhaps individual components of a futuristic machine. They appear as if they belonged to a self-contained system; as if they could be assembled into a co-dependent larger whole.
A reverse excavation
At the same time, the formal characteristics of Köster’s sculptures also evoke associations with ancient amphorae. As we encounter the ceramic objects presented on pedestals in the exhibition space, detached from the functionality of their water-dispensing relatives, it almost feels as if we were moving through the collection of an archaeological museum or along provisionally set up presentation tables at an ancient excavation site. Their mysterious presence as carriers of meaning is further manifested by handwritten inscriptions and engraved drawings depicting hands on the surface of the clay. The minimalist wooden constructions on which the sculptures rest, each positioned on a glass plate, are also marked with writings that may be interpreted as a description of their creation process or as a directive: “My hands sink into the earth, pushing and shoving the material to the sides, following gravity. The hands create a hollow space which, when filled with water, becomes a basin. […] Water moves through its walls. Travelling through the forms in their horizontal plane. Is sucked, pulled, pressed.”2 While the archaeological gaze is naturally a reconstructive one, these inscriptions in turn seem to refer to a function of the object that it has not yet fulfilled. In this installation, Köster, whose expansive practice originates in painting, reverses temporal causality to a certain extent: like artefacts from a future excavation, these “technofossils” are actually still waiting to be buried in the ground in the first place.
Twisted, knotted, entangled, intergrown.
Following their exhibition presentation, Kathrin Köster indeed ‘plants’ some of her ollas into the ground, where, as the title of one of the ceramic sculptures in the series suggests, they become “entangled” with their surroundings, part of a subterranean system of roots and organisms, of mutual give and take. There is of course a certain poetry in the gesture of returning the clay, as burnt earth, into the soil in a communal moment of planting. At the same time, this gesture also raises the recurring question about the status of the functionality of the art object itself. In her critical examination of (actual) ethnographic collections, curator Clémentine Deliss refers in this context to Bruno Latour’s distinction between the “ostensive” and “performative” definition of an object. While the ostensive, or manifest, definition refers to the static nature of an artefact, the performative definition suggests that an artefact can also generate new meanings through interaction.3 In their transit from the exhibition space to the ground, Köster’s sculptures are subject to both an ostensive (in their original function as an irrigation system) and a performative (speculating on their future interaction) frame of reference. A similar conclusion can be found in an earlier reflection on Kathrin Köster’s practice by Hanne Loreck. In relation to the artist’s expansive and spatially oriented painterly process and her exploration of the fold as a motif and theme, Loreck describes “the act of the fold” as both a performative and an operative principle.4
We can meanwhile only speculate about the act of the buried sculptures: How the submerged objects will undergo a continuous transformation alongside the roots surrounding them in the soil; how they will constantly change their subterranean environment while at the same time becoming one with it. Over time, the vessels will likely decompose and eventually become soil again, consumed by microorganisms that feed on their fertile mulch. Where their presence has enriched the soil, their decomposition will now leave a negative space, which will in turn be enriched by their decay. They’ll quietly whisper their story of permeability and permanence.
(1) Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, in: Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 165-70; quote in subheading: p. 166.
(2) Kathrin Köster, 2023.
(3) Bruno Latour, ‘Reassembling the Social. An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory’ (Oxford, 2005), quoted from: Clémentine Deliss, The Metabolic Museum. (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020), 64.
(4) Hanne Loreck, ‘The Act of the Fold.On Kathrin Köster’s works since 2014’, in: Kathrin Köster. ex plica. (Berlin: argobooks, 2019), 7-17.