Katharina Siegel

Katharina Siegel is an artist based between London and Berlin, who received a Diploma in Painting and Printmaking from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and a Master in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art London.

She operates between the disciplines of contemporary art practice and critical thinking, with interests in critical art historian historiography and philosophy as well as in narrative and reflexive systems in contemporary fine art. Her multidisciplinary art practice is often research based and explores concepts of experience, space, temporality and process.
Siegel works across sculpture, drawing and writing. Taking her own drawing practice as a starting point of investigation, she focuses on the question how aesthetic experience can be (re-)presented, in order to become communicable. And more specifically, if there is an interrelationship between aesthetic perception and aesthetic production that manifests itself in the artistic process as a response to an aesthetic experience of one's own presence. Every response makes references. References to what affects us, that is to say, to what attracts, moves or "hits" us.

In philosophy, these references are described using terms such as meaning, intention, attention, and affection. What they all have in common is that they are something we can not control but something that guides and directs us. Drawing in a notational manner is for Siegel a way to translate experience into a medium, a graphic utterance as a trace, which is constantly shifting, condensing, dissolving and being re-understood. Her interest in the critical role attributed to notational practices in terms of how we think in the arts has influenced her ideas of what images are or signs show. Notational practices take on a role that help to transform the idea of art itself, the way it is made, discussed and received. Interested in the concept of an archive and the possibility to create knowledge, a narrative or imagery out of its material by re-arranging, repetition or transformation, she started cataloguing the fragments of her research and work process. While working with her archival material the relationship between concept, recording, repetition and work is redefined and the drafting processes themselves become autonomous works of art.

In the artistic process, the pluralistic aesthetic forms of perception and the way in which they find expression in observation, memory or description finally merge with the aesthetic enactment of the work processes itself. Siegel questions what role the artistic process, as a practice of translation of experience play in experimental spaces, in spaces of sensation and affect that can not be measured, whose parameters shift and suddenly go in other directions.
Can it make visible what we can not yet see and thus make possible what we can not yet think?