KATERINA KNIGHT
WE LOVE WOMEN
PHOTOS BY CLAIRE O'KEEFE
Katerina Knight is an artist and writer who creates textile works embroidered with dried plants. She gathers her own materials, foraging them in the hills or growing them directly, mostly in the communal garden of her Buddhist temple, but also in pots outside her small apartment. On the inside, her home is decked with grasses at different stages of desiccation, jars of seeds and drying petals lining shelves of books and yarns. “My home life and my artist life,” she explains, “it's all merged as one.”
Creating is a slow and repetitive ritual for Katerina, and she likes it that way. She begins sowing her seeds in February and March, plants them out in May, and harvests their flowers in July and August. These she must then dry until around November before she can begin to use them. Katerina’s practice and days are tied to the seasons and manners of the English countryside. “In the summertime, I can be doing all the growing and the harvesting and be outdoors,” she says, “and then during the wintertime, […] I'm doing more inside. I'm hibernating, but all these materials are helping me to feel connected to nature and the landscape. So, it's created this nice kind of cyclical rhythm with my practice.”
Katerina’s current synchrony with the elements is the result of her deliberate departure from a high-strung background in fashion. Katerina studied printed textile design at the Glasgow School of Art, then worked for luxury fashion brands in London and Stockholm while developing her craft as a printer. Yet she soon found that scaling her textile projects involved harsh chemicals damaging to nature and her health. At the same time, she grew appalled by the industry’s exploitative tenor, by its seasonality and its imperative for growth. “I was looking at people who were in positions above me, and I was like, ‘I don't want this. What am I doing?’ I feel like I lost all sense of purpose and my love for textiles.” When circumstances worsened under the pandemic, Katerina, depleted, desperately needed a change.
In 2021, Katerina moved back in with her parents. “I got into gardening and connected with the slowness of the process, particularly weeding and doing something repetitive over and over again.” In gardening, Katerina found healing: “I was looking after nature, and in turn, nature looked after me. I felt like I was learning to just be present again. In fashion, you were always working on several collections, and everything was in the future. I was never really present.”
When Katerina returned to London for a master’s at the Royal College of Art, she did so with the resolve to bring horticulture into her textile work. She also no longer wanted to work with machines. “I wanted it to just be about me and my hands, making slowly.” She discovered embroidery and experimented with the materials she was growing. “And then it just really evolved from there.”
Katerina relocated to Malvern in early 2024 to bring herself closer to nature. Now in her late twenties, she’s out on a walk within 20 minutes of waking up. She finds she writes best in the mornings and does her sowing, weeding, or weaving in the afternoons. She knows which plants are best for drying (cornflower and chamomile) and which to use as dyes (rosemary and dahlia), and experiments with new species each year (this year: statice, strawflower, and gypsophila).
Lavender is Katerina’s favorite; “It's almost like it's designed to be a bead,” she’ll say with delight. “Look at each seed: there is a hole that runs across, and it's like it's designed for the needle to go through.” And the colors: “The real rich, deep purples. And then you get much softer lilac tones, and you can get nice pinks and whites. Also, there's just something—I don't know if it's a bit of a placebo—but the aroma is very sensorial. It's very healing. And so, it feels like it speaks very much to the narrative of my work.”
It can take Katerina up to 250 hours to complete just one piece. To her, the beauty lies in the process, though beauty—and the beauty in nature—also defines her finished works. In some, petals and seeds draw patterns on woven tapestries; others are peppered with dried flowers sewn into naturally dyed silks. Though not technically wearable, Katerina likes to drape her pieces over herself and others. “With textiles, there is such an intimacy between fabric and wearer,” she explains. “I love working with the body, doing shoots; all of those things, I loved about working in fashion. The curation of something.” “There is a relationship between art and the body that I'm still very much exploring.”
As far as her art’s eventual decay, Katerina sees it as a welcome stage of the process. “I think the impermanence of it is something that also speaks to life and how it won’t last forever. Our textiles, the objects we have, might not last forever. I actually have no idea how long my pieces are going to last. I'm very honest about that.” What’s more, she continues, “I think that also speaks to being present with things and not worrying about the future. Just appreciating something as it is.”
Katerina lives each day in the present—even the slower days, like in June, when her seeds have been sown, but the flowers are not yet there to harvest. She cannot rush her art; it is as beholden to her as it is to the humors of the earth, where it will eventually return. So, these days, she carefully weeds her flower beds, writes and teaches, and waits for the buds to grow.