See how artist Kathrin Linkersdorff’s work captures beauty in imperfection and impermanence.
Linkersdorff is inspired by the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which celebrates the beauty of transience and imperfection in life. Through her art, she embodies wabi-sabi using the aesthetics of living organisms like flowers and bacteria, preserving the delicate balance between life and death in a stunning array of color and form.
The captivating images displayed here are part of Linkersdorff’s series Fairies. For this collection, she carefully dried various tulips over several months, extracting their pigments and creating natural dyes using a method she developed over years. Linkersdorff then suspended the flowers in liquid, allowing their petals to unfold, often reintroducing the dyes into the liquid medium.
“The interplay of color and shape becomes a poetic dance, revealing the hidden alchemy present in all living matter,” she says. “To me, pigment is an expression of life.”
Fairies, along with more of Linkersdorff’s works, including her new series Microverse, will be exhibited at PHOXXI, the Temporary House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in Germany, until 21 January 2024.
