Biography

Katusha Bull creates sculpture to live with. Each piece best rewards those who commit to a close, ongoing relationship with it, observing it on a day by day basis. Only then can a viewer fully understand how her works change with the endlessly changing lights of different times of day, seasons and even locations, creating subtly shifting aesthetic and emotional effects on a personal, intimate scale.

Being so purely abstract, her art is open for all to enjoy. Each piece means nothing less, and nothing more, than what it is. She makes no exclusive cultural or philosophical references, and requires no specialist sculptural knowledge of her audience. Rather, each work explores the directly present formal properties of the individual stone being worked on, and of the wider visual world that we all live in.

Those formal properties are brought out in stone through Katusha’s uniquely iconoclastic carving style. Her sculptural training and experience has helped her become both a confident reinventor of existing techniques, and a bold explorer of new ways of working. At the moment, she’s working mostly with alabaster, but has also worked in marble, calcite and onyx. Her suppliers know her work well, and source stones that they know she will find inspiring from a variety of worldwide sources.

Her aesthetic is defined in particular by her fascination with the endlessly paradoxical Möbius loop, and related natural curls, twists and waves. This fascination stems from a deep awareness of, and sensitivity to, the constant flow of the natural world in general. Her sculptures embody this endless, universal movement, and – by capturing it on such an intimate scale – help those of us lucky enough to live with them both understand, and explore, its perpetual presence in us all.

Gallery Elena Shchukina has exhibited Katusha Bull’s sculptures alongside the works of Kyosuke Tchinai and Miguel Kohler-Jan at Lees Place.