We Visit Katharina Fitz’s Nottingham Studio and Learn All About Her Groundbreaking Work

Katharina Fitz grew up in Austria, but moved to Nottingham in her adulthood, where she began her artistic career. For the past two years, she has worked at Nottingham Trent University as a ceramics technician, and is currently working freelance for Real Creative Futures - based at the New Art Exchange - as a creative and professional mentor. 

“I never really consciously decided to become an artist,” she admits when asked about making the step into the creative industry. “I just slowly grew into it out of a necessity for engaging with my surroundings.” 

Conducting the interview in her Nottingham art studio gives us a strong sense for how she builds her practice - the space is filled with lots of curious sculptural objects and industrial materials that show the experimental and hands-on approach of her work. She explains that she especially loves materials associated with industrial environments because “they are non-decorative places that radiate something intriguing and honest, and that really interests me.”

Fitz also has a special love for the built environment and the city; she loves the architecture, the structures and the processes that take place in urban settings. “I think about the experience of how we see and live in places, around objects and all the historical and industrial processes that come with that,” she explains.

It is not just the physical form of the city, though, but the experience of the places they form. She especially likes scenes that have a “raw, practical, and unembellished atmosphere”. We get a strong impression of this from her own space, which is raw, practical and unembellished.

Fitz’s practice involves a remarkably varied amount of materials. She typically uses industrial materials such as plaster, clay, steel, wood and latex, and puts them through a fascinating process of turning, scraping, baking, cutting and fixing together. This process is at the core of much of Fitz’s work; she creates her art in a way that is embodied within the finished pieces themselves. Many sculptural works we see in her studio are an assemblage of the sculptural materials combined with the tools and devices that were used to create them. She explains that it is like an unintentional staging of objects and tools with the always apparent traces of the labour involved that speaks of time and process. 

However, her practice has not always been this way. Over the past decade, Fitz’s work has changed dramatically, from completely different mediums and techniques and subjects. In fact, she started out by using photographs to make her art. “I began taking street photographs in my early twenties but never really considered my work as art,” she muses. “But after releasing my first photo series called Dornbirn Houses in 2012, which was about my hometown Dornbirn, I moved from documentary to conceptual photography and became aware of the medium's potential to open up conversations and interpretations in different ways. I became interested in the multiple meanings and feelings I was able to convey through images, and that felt very liberating and exciting to me.” 

She tells us that a particular feature she loves in the English urban landscape is chimney pots. After taking photographs of these types of elements, she started making her own chimneys and other objects through mould-making and casting. It was at this point, however, that she realised she was "more interested in the language between the moulds, the models and the casts and its relationship with the finished object."  

We ask her what and who inspires her the most, and she explains that she is currently “obsessed with the work of Gary Kuehn”. “He speaks a visual and conceptual language that makes me feel at home,” she continues. “I admire Phyllida Barlow's boldness and high sensitivity to materials, and when the making gets tough, I always find Tim Ingold's or Emma Cocker's writings a great way to find my way back into the studio.”

In 2019 she had a solo show called When Seams Become Audible, which she tells us is one of her biggest professional achievements. The opportunity to do this show was the result of winning the One Thoresby Street production award, as part of the New Art Exchange Open in the same year. “This was right after graduating, which was an important confidence boost at the time and helped me to keep my practice going,” she explains. “I couldn't have asked for a better space to exhibit in, and during a six-week long residency, I managed to get my most ambitious installation done and ready for the opening. We managed to open the exhibition right between the first and the second lockdown and I was very grateful for the support from One Thoresby Street to make it happen during challenging times."

Fitz shows us that much of the work in her studio space is brand new, and has been created for an upcoming solo exhibition in August at Beam Editions art gallery in Nottingham. Visiting this space is like capturing a moment in a photograph during a never-ending process of experimentation and creation. This gives her work a vitality and interest that is deeply intriguing and instils a sense of unpredictability that means no one can truly know what she will be doing ten years from now - but whatever it is promises to be groundbreaking.

Katharina Fitz has an upcoming solo exhibition at Beam Gallery, which will open on Friday 19 August. She will also be publishing a book with the Beam Editions publishing house at the Gallery

@katharina_fitz