Sarjeant Happenings: Whanganui artist-in-residence Areez Katki keen to explore use of local materials

Tylee Cottage artist-in-residence Areez Katki explores genetic and cultural origins through embroidery, tapestry, weaving, beading, painting, printmaking, sculpture and poetry.

The current Tylee Cottage artist-in-residence, Areez Katki, says he calls no particular place home but for the next few months he has elected Whanganui and the residency to further develop his practice and to explore materials.

Katki, 34, born in Mumbai, India, is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. His practice explores genetic and cultural origins through embroidery, tapestry, weaving, beading, painting, printmaking, sculpture and poetry.

On one wall in the Tylee Cottage studio hang lengths of textiles from his natal and spiritual homes – textiles, originally destined for pyjamas that he has inherited through his family in India. They accompany him wherever he goes, and he has travelled widely - Europe, the Middle East, Greece and Iran, formerly Persia, a land of many cultures, and another ancestral echo for Katki where his Zoroastrian faith originated.

On another wall hang abstract works he has created for his next exhibition at McLeavey Gallery, Wellington – delicately embroidered abstract works, stitched with curling geometric and occasionally figurative designs on repurposed household textiles.

“I embroider very loosely the faint memory of another culture. I think that we pick up on where our parents left off or we have threads of what our ancestors gave us in our memories; it’s kind of embedded. So even though I don’t speak certain languages or understand certain facts or have access to intellectual material from the ancient past, I think my job as an academic and an artist, and also a person from that lineage, is to try and understand it and decode it in my own way,” Katki said.

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.”