While reflecting on the relational and affective qualities conjured by organic materials—the histories they hold, the traces they leave in the bodily archive—Katki decided to explore some of these materials and process them as pigments for a series of paintings. The term ‘anointing’ or ‘to anoint’ have very obvious spiritual associations, while also holding deeply corporeal qualities where a liquid, particularly oil, is used for many religious ceremonies (particularly in Zoroastrianism but also within the Judeo-Christian canon) to mark and sanctify a body for ceremonial purposes.

Katki has borrowed this verb from a religious lexicon, but also removed it from the auspices of spiritual or religio-cultural specificity. The act of anointing, here, acts more in reference to his own personal relationship with queer ecologies: materials that he has historic and personal affinities for, materials that conjure sensorial meanderings, and thus, materials which also speak of his own corporeality. By extension of this relational study, four meaningful substances that he found himself able to trace, stain and mark surfaces of his body with, and subsequently these four sheets of cotton paper with, were chosen for this series.

Katki’s first painting from the Anointed series utilizes a small bottlecap of green earth, which he encountered one day in winter 2023 while he went up river with his friends in Whanganui. As they stopped along the banks during a hike on that rainy morning, Katki began noticing how pigments along the riverbank had changed in hue as they went further north. His friends, who were Tangata Whenua (people of the land in Te Reo Māori; the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand), asked him to dig slightly deeper on two separate occasions, to see their changes. On one, near the Atene grounds in Whanganui, Katki noticed a cobalt blue hue in the earth; on another occasion, a yellowish green emerged. As Katki kneeled on that rainy day, fossicking for the perfect small example of greenish clay ore, his knees made small divots in the damp earth that pooled with rainwater. What we see represented simply in this painting are nine small divots made by Katki’s knees in the earth, which pooled with water and reflected the color of the sky that day. Thus, in doing so, Katki borrowed the smallest amount (a bottle-cap) of clay, with the permission of those Indigenous to the land; with an agreement that he’d use it as a tool for learning about its qualities and memorializing a moment where land—specific to a site—is juxtaposed visually with the universal realm that is the sky. Both tesselate simultaneously on one surface, while the pools also become distinct markings that testify how Katki’s body bore witness to the event.