ARTIST STATEMENT

Katharina Forster works across sculpture, installation and textile-based processes. Using discarded everyday materials – used tea bags, clothing labels, candle wax, packaging and other objects marked by use – she explores how value is produced through time, labour and human relationships.

Her practice begins where the social life of objects is often considered to have ended. Materials that have lost their economic value become sites of artistic inquiry. Through slow, repetitive manual processes such as spinning, weaving, sewing, crocheting and assembling, they are transformed into sculptures and installations that question how value is assigned, remembered and experienced.

Rather than treating materials as passive matter, Forster approaches them as carriers of memory. Traces of touch, use and time remain embedded within them, revealing histories that extend beyond their original function. Her works invite viewers to consider how **manual labour—particularly forms of repetitive and often invisible labour—**shapes both material and cultural value.

Manual making is not simply a technique but a way of thinking. In an increasingly dematerialised and accelerated world, Forster understands making as a form of close observation and embodied knowledge. Rather than resolving contradictions, her sculptures inhabit them. Transformation becomes both a physical process and a conceptual one: materials are not restored to what they once were but enter new relationships, meanings and systems of value.

Her sculptures and installations inhabit the intersection of materiality, memory and labour. They propose that value does not reside in the new, the rare or the pristine, but emerges through attention, time and our relationship with the material world.