Moving A Mountain | Katerina Kotsala
Katerina Kotsala’s work could be seen as a surreal and deliberately exaggerated vision of the future, serving as either warning or premonition.
The artist’s exhibition Moving A Mountain, curated by Dimitra Tsiaouskoglou, took place exactly a year ago at AK38 Project Space, Athens, Greece.
Katerina Kotsala, 2023 | Photo: Panagiotis Baxevanis
Text by Dimitra Tsiaouskoglou
Kotsala’s artistic practice revolves around the troubled relationship between humans and the natural world; the manifestation of universal issues such as birth and death in the natural environment; and the coexistence of human and non-human living beings. The exhibition Moving A Mountain featured artworks created during the three preceding years, and included a large-scale painting, sculptural installations and found-object based mosaics.
In Kotsala’s universe, tropical forests, exotic birds and strange creatures meet, clash, adapt and regenerate in somewhat complex relationships. Her works function as fragmentary narratives across species, suggesting imaginative, almost dystopian futures. Humans and non-humans are bound together, they contaminate each other, they necessarily adapt to survive, they move forward despite challenges.
How Can A Blind Bird Fly 2023 | Pistachio shells, glass, acrylic colours | 75 x 45 x 25cm | Photo: Panagiotis Baxevanis
Mother 2020 | Wood, pistachio shells, glass, acrylic colours | 105 x 60 x 35cm | Photo: Panagiotis Baxevanis
Kotsala joins the current discourse around critical climate change, focusing on the urgent need for a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness between nature and humans. Through her works a series of questions arise: how can we as humans experience and visualise the non-human? What alternative, non-human stories are to be told amid climate catastrophes? How does adaptability, resilience and survival reveal itself within the context of a climate emergency across species?
Elephant 2023 | Palm tree wood, pistachio shells, glass, acrylic colours | 69 x 26 x 17cm | Photo: Panagiotis Baxevanis
Black Blind Bird 2023 | Pistachio shells, glass, acrylic colours, copper, 27 x 20 x 19cm | Photo: Panagiotis Baxevanis
The conceptual framework of this series is deeply inspired by the anthropologist Anna Tsing’s important contribution to contemporary ecological thought, particularly concerning the notion of contaminated diversity, which gives prominence to humble non-human, ecological narratives, and highlights the necessity of entanglement and adaptation in precarious conditions.
Kotsala’s painting practice overflows with deceptively idyllic landscapes, at times overwhelmingly euphoric, which despite the intense and mesmerizing colours, reveal an uneasy, almost ominous atmosphere. In her work Moving A Mountain the brushstrokes consisting of a variety of contrasting textures, structures, patterns and bold colour combinations, conjure up a simultaneously paradisal, other-worldly and menacing landscape. Appropriating exoticized representations of nature, Kotsala disrupts the promise of harmony we experience in nature, while commenting on how the natural landscape today is more consumed, rather than experienced.
In her sculptural works, she brings together mostly natural materials, which she manipulates through the arduous, meditative and tactile process of mosaics. The creatures that arise after such an improbable collision of materials and techniques seem to have escaped from imaginary nonanthropocentric narratives, as in the work How Can A Blind Bird Fly. In her sculptural work, she often works with found objects, particularly from the natural environment, with which she experiments with concealing and revealing them. Interestingly, she employs natural materials, usually pistachio shells, glass and stone which are intrinsically difficult to manipulate and adapt.
“Through a tactile and sensory process Kotsala creates environmentally conscious art.”
Moving A Mountain 2023 | Oil on canvas, 190 x 155cm | Photo: Panagiotis Baxevanis
The series presents itself as a reflection on our relationship with – and responsibility toward – the natural world. At the same time, Kotsala’s work is an intimate contemplation on motherhood; an ever-evolving mixture of tenderness and ferocity, nourishment and threat.
Lost in the Forest 2021 | Natural stones and marbles, stringer glass, terra puzzolane, on board, 70 x 58.5 x 4cm | Photo: Panagiotis Baxevanis
Look out for the artist’s night installation ASTROWALKER’S CONSTELLATION – an ongoing project using solar lights in remote places, creating earth constellations as an attempt to highlight environmental issues, specifically light pollution. The constellation will appear in Syros island within the framework of ANIMASYROS 2025.
Artworks by Katerina Kotsala | Photography by Panagiotis Baxevanis / Courtesy of the artist | Text by Dimitra Tsiaouskoglou | Produced & edited by A La Luz, 2024 | Please do not re-publish any of the above without prior written consent
