Katie Beatta Hovden Wolff (b. 1997) is an interdisciplinary artist working in printmaking, fibers, collage, sculpture, and writing. She graduated with a BFA in Studio Art from Black Hills State University in 2020 and is currently an MFA candidate in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. An intuitive maker, Wolff’s studio practice is rooted in an unyielding curiosity for the inherent poetics of the body’s relationship to material.
Guided by intuition, I engage making as a question asked. Undesirous of answers, my practice is sustained by moments of curiosity and a commitment to pulling the loose threads. The photographic tendencies in my work are tethered to a familial archive of photos depicting places I am deeply attached to and intensely familiar with. Reproducing the vantage points of those who captured the original image, I step into a temporal dialogue of bearing witness to a mutually embodied place through time. By embedding the photographic image in material–directly or indirectly through modes of printmaking–I materialize and reconfigure the landscape of my inheritance. In collaboration with concrete, textiles, photographs, found objects, and printed matter, I’m seeking a material poetics indexical to that which has made me.