Katherine Ball is a habitat for fungi and bacteria located on planet Earth.
Moving together in symbiosis, like waves moving an ocean, they practice the art of living on a damaged planet.
Their artistic interventions reimagine the infrastructure of everyday life. These have included: living in an off-grid floating island building mushroom filters to clean a polluted lake, bicycling across the USA looking for ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis, coordinating a national day of action to halt business at banks and corporations influencing state laws, and apprenticing with nature to learn the biological counterpart to civil disobedience.
An amateur in the best sense of the word, originally from Detroit, Michigan, Katherine strives to give more energy to our dreams than our fears. Currently, Katherine lives in Berlin and is the ‘Water Filtration and Infiltration’ artist-in-residence at Floating University. (www.floatinguniversity.org/water)
Katherine has a Master in Fine Arts in Social Practice from Portland State University and studied at the School of Walls and Space in Copenhagen. Their books include ‘Not Broken Yet: Life in the Mojave Desert’ and ‘Utopia Walks Away: Infrastructure in Copenhagen, Denmark’ and their artwork is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Katherine has been a Fulbright Fellow, German Chancellor Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow. Their websites are: katherineball.com and everydayinfrastructure.net
Katherine’s artistic medium is the infrastructure of everyday life. Created to enable us, protect us or dominate us, infrastructure shapes the way we live, and we can shape our own infrastructure. Infrastructure is not a fixed set of systems, but a working field. It is a malleable material.