In earlier years, Kathrin Linkersdorff spent two years in Tokyo on a scholarship, immersing herself in Japanese culture and learning sumi-e, the traditional art of ink painting. During her time in Japan, she also encountered a profound approach to nature, one marked by reverence and attentiveness. Nature is seen as a living presence, and observing it is regarded as a path to spiritual insight.
It is therefore unsurprising that she chooses natural subjects for her experimental still lifes, aiming to capture the fleeting expression of perfection in decline. In line with Japanese philosophy, true beauty is often revealed through decay. For many years, Linkersdorff has explored processes such as drying, decolorizing, and soaking flowers, with tulips emerging as her most compelling subjects.
In the series “Wabi Sabi” (2013–2018) Kathrin Linkersdorff dried and studied flowers over long periods, photographing them at the brief moment when their colours and forms remain concentrated just before decay. Working with pigments that vanish quickly under UV light, she captured a fragile luminosity. Each image becomes a portrait of a flower at the threshold between presence and disappearance.
As the flowers withered, they underwent striking transformations that led the artist to wonder how these dried forms would respond to liquid again. In her series “Floriszenzen” (2019), tulips reawaken in unexpected contortions, while their pigments dissolve into the surrounding solution and leave fleeting, figurative traces—echoes of life within the transient. In the subsequent “Fairies” (2020 – ongoing) series, Linkersdorff intensified this setting while her studio gradually became a laboratory where she not only observed chemical reactions but also experimented with them.
Seeking to understand the interplay between floral structures and their pigments, she developed a method to extract anthocyanins from dried tulips, revealing the transparent fiber structures and their inherent fragility. Inspired by her earlier observations, she reintroduced the purified pigments into some of the pale still lifes, using them like ink. Her photographs record this poetic “reunion”, in which tulip petals act as brushes and transform color into a metaphor for life.
In her most recent “Microverse” (2023–ongoing) Linkersdorff extends her pigment research into microbiology. As artist in residence at the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, she studied streptomycetes—soil bacteria that generate their own vividly colored antibiotics. Applied to previously decolorized plant material, these organisms unfold diverse behaviours depending on context and preparation. By merging decay with new growth, “Microverse” reveals the cyclical flow of matter in nature.