Student Spotlight: Katharine Marais ‘19

By
Daphne Palasi Andreades
December 01, 2017

The Student Spotlight series aims to highlight the work of current MFA students, asking them to share thoughts on their practice by answering curated and peer-submitted questions.

Katharine Marais ‘19 is an MFA Visual Arts student in her first year.

 

What themes or subjects are you currently addressing in your work?

Right now I’m making a pop music video for Weezer. It’s an improvisational ballet with a DIY ethos: sublime, poetic, dreamy.

 

What materials are you working with at the moment?

Ballet, video, poetry, film photography, painting, drawing.

 

Are there any themes or materials you’re interested in exploring in the future?

I’m interested in beauty, and the feeling of different places, different flowers, different people. I’m also interested in the way that my dreams and poems create parallel, metaphoric, symbolic narratives for the real events that shape my life—One time I wrote, “aestheticizing my world in a way that creates dreaming. Like the waking and sleeping imaginations grow each other, like a slowly rotating, expansive space that becomes ever-fuller and more luminous. Loving the space rotates the space so that it can see itself and generate luminescence.”

The next work I’m interested in making is a ballet for a poem I wrote about a bullfighter who decides to leave the ring to become a flowering tree. He composes love poems that blossom in the form of flowers. It’s a little gender-bendy, quixotic, and very stylized; stark, statuesque beauty with both longer, meditative cuts, and shorter more rhythmic interludes than my last video work.

I sort of want my next work to feel like the material ratios of an orchid on a bit of highly fertile dirt, in a room of deep blue cobalt. For example, maybe you see it, alone: You are wearing a long rope, of rough, scratchy twine, with a raw pearl strung at the base of it. You feel the heaviness of the stone and the lightness of the twine, the loose chaos and fertility of the earth and the ethereal breath of the orchid. You understand beauty and melancholy, hope and the fossilization of hope.

Right now I also think dappled mustangs are very beautiful, and bells. Rough bells. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. These things are all beautiful. Last year, I wrote a book with a harpist in it, and a horseback rider.

 

What challenges do you face in your practice?

Finding the time to fully realize the infinite number of ideas I have for works of experimental theatre/ballets/paintings. Also, I’d like to find more collaborators, especially in the music and dance fields, who are highly skilled and interested in making original works. I think the world needs more new stories.

 

Who are artists or works of art that inspire you? Who are contemporary artists that are doing interesting work?

I’ve been feeling inspired by the surreal quality of Edward Weston’s photographs. I can’t really name that many contemporary artists whose work I’m interested in, to be honest with you. I’m more interested in music and film; I enjoy them more and find that more interesting work is being done in those fields than in contemporary art.

You could argue that art is a form of unproductive consumerism, so unless it’s a remarkable, deeply thoughtful work whose intellectual and spiritual value is apparent to me, I’m generally not that excited about it. The aesthetic and actual excesses of the art world can be a little nauseating. Sometimes I see Jeff Koons’ work, for example, and I feel like we, as a culture, could have chosen instead to build a school for children in a third-world country, or a community garden, or whatever, with these resources. Like a thousand community gardens.

I worry about our culture a lot. Contemporary art is not what I feel it should be. Art is important for shaping our vision for the world. I hope that my work affects positive change in society.

Nils Frahm is a contemporary piano composer whose work inspires me greatly. I also love Philip Glass’ work with Ravi Shankar. In terms of my painting and poetry, I’m feeling inspired by Brian and Rivers from Weezer. Rivers’ analytical analysis of pop music and interest in ornithology inspires.

 

How do you think artists can continue growing as artists?

Friendship, travel, learning new skills. Really opening yourself up completely to new people and understanding the way they think and feel, and how they make their life cool and individual—It’s the same with landscapes. Like, why is this landscape beautiful, and how does culture interweave with the natural world? It’s like a melody over a rhythm, very multisensory. Really listen to the shape of your feelings, the shape of other people’s feelings, the sound and color of the land.

Language blossoms from a seed of feeling—you can’t just keep turning out works just to work. It’s like, go back to living for a while, sometimes. Take a new job. You could be a salmon-counter in Alaska. Stand there with a little clicker and count the salmon when they go upstream, watch the water all day. Work the front desk at an astronomy observatory, learn about the skies. Maybe be a flight attendant or a ferryboat captain. Actually maybe don't be a ferryboat captain if you're a daydreamer. But you could be a magazine intern and watch documentaries about sailing, or an intern for a puppeteer. Something. One time I got into dancing cha-cha, with the man who made Michael Jackson's dancing shoes. I feel like that opened up my mind to serendipity and the possibilities of your city. I feel like I needed some magic at that moment, and he gave it to me.

When you really really feel beauty, you will also understand how to express it, it will just flow.