Katie Hudnall received her BFA in Sculpture from the Corcoran College of Art & Design and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Furniture Design/Woodworking.
Her work has been included in many publications and exhibitions including Crafting A Continuum: Rethinking Contemporary Craft, Making A Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking, and in American Craft Magazine’s February/March 2017 issue.
Hudnall lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she runs the Woodworking and Furniture Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. When she’s not teaching she spends her time making tools for problems both real and imagined.
Statement:
I build large furnitural objects from small, rough, discarded bits of wood, sketching pieces together in three dimensions. I don’t hide connections between parts and I leave traces of the intuitive processes used in making the work. These details become visual patterns and act as a record of the making itself, a map of the time that has gone into assembling and imbuing dumpster-rescued materials with worth through care and labor.
Fragile looking and creature-like, my works are interactive storytellers. They transform everyday objects and moments into opportunities for delight and wonder, performing odd and unlikely functions that defy their seemingly precarious stances. In the Let Goer, a tall, friendly structure holds a maple seed 11 feet in the air that can be released with the press of a simple lever, allowing users to enjoy the 3 seconds it takes the seed to gently whirl to the ground. The maximal effort to minimal reward in each piece flips the script on our assumptions that efficiency and speed are always the preferred path no matter the actual goal. Instead, I am tapping into the delight in seeing something work that shouldn’t, the hope from a thing endlessly repaired, no matter how many times it has broken, and the beauty that comes from seeing so much effort and time dedicated to sharing moments of unexpected joy.
