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.

In Vetiver, drawn using an ittar oil roller, Katki mines the sensorial and physical position of his body from another memory: of kneeling in the backyard of a friend’s house in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (Aotearoa NZ), where he began digging the fragrant roots of a large vetiver grass plant. A metaphysical transposition of memory into marks on paper was attempted as Katki knelt on the leaf and drew an outline of his knees and thighs in the same position. This was done using a very old roller of khus, or vetiver, ittar oil that he had found in his late-grandfather’s drawer in Mumbai and had since intermittently used on his body. The redolence of this aged vetiver oil being used as a drawing tool, and the repositioning of his thighs in the same kneeling position from that day in his friend’s backyard conjure the sensations we might associate with the heady, earthen elements of fragrant vegetation and summer heat. The notion of anointing one’s body is demonstrated here in a very physical way, where the body invariably features again, as a fragment in this work—sanctified by the oil and impressions of vegetation in the watery facture of this painting.