In Kingston, a small city in New York’s Hudson Valley with a strong creative community, artist Kat Howard works from a house built in 1680. It has old beams, a stone fireplace and a studio filled with books and materials, with piles of silk cocoons, samples pinned to the wall and a loom. Upstairs, more books are stacked in a library. Kat describes the space as “kind of a witchy house”. As her installations have grown in scale, the studio has become a site for making parts before the work is assembled elsewhere. “It’s almost like a dry dock for shipbuilding,” she says. “I build all the components in here and then go on site to install it.”
Kat’s practice is rooted in language. As an undergraduate, Kat studied art history and creative writing, with a focus on poetry. A professor introduced her to artists’ books, opening a way of thinking about a text through the structure that contains it. She questioned “what would happen if I thought of them more like the container of the book itself, and how it could almost be a sculptural interpretation of the text.”
At Mills College in Oakland, where she pursued master’s degrees in poetry and studio art, this interest expanded into installation. For her thesis, Kat made a human-sized tunnel book for the viewer to walk through, with paper walls “like quilts”, embroidered with thread that resembled hair and text. She was thinking about “the body as text”, and about what a book or poem might become in a larger space. “That’s how I got into fibre art,” she says.
Much of Kat’s work explores how the body holds trauma. She speaks of the attempt to give physical presence to experiences larger than the body can contain. “It’s always this attempt that I have, or this desire, to try to mend,” she says. Early works used fairy tales and folklore as lenses through which to address her experiences.
A recent work, Howl, is eight feet by eight feet, made from artificial sinew and raw flax. Kat describes it as resembling “an open abstracted mouth”, a form connected to voice and identity. “Where do our voices come from, where do our identities come from,” she asks, and “can we still feel when something wants to be said even if it’s not loud or named?” Another ongoing installation features thousands of silk cocoons set into panels.
In the studio, Kat writes down her ideas, then asks how they might exist as a physical piece. “My work all starts like a poem,” she says. From there, she makes maquettes and prototypes, testing how materials behave before the work enters a larger space. “There’s a lot of exploration that happens in the making of pieces which I love,” she says. “That aliveness” is part of what draws her to site-specific work, where the final installation responds to the space in which it is contained. Being large-scale, her pieces may seem to press you into a corner or require you to move around them. They also invite a proximity to material memory. “We all have a sense memory of touch of cloth from infancy,” she says, describing a “material language” carried in all of us.
She is drawn to natural matter: raw wool, raw flax, seed pods, rushes, reeds, cocoons and scraps of vellum from a family-owned tannery. She also works with domestic objects such as clotheslines, upholstery piping, quilt batting and stockings. Raw flax interests her because it can resemble horse hair or human hair, while water chestnut seed pods, gathered from the Hudson River, appear spiked and strange. “I think our brains can place that they’re from nature, but we don’t immediately know what they are,” she says.
To mark New York Textile Month, Kat is developing a new installation from remnant yarns from previous TOAST collections. It follows an earlier collaboration with TOAST in Hudson, New York, where Kat worked with old denim to make a site-specific work knotted into wire, “undulating like a wave”. This time, she is exploring the myth of Penelope in The Odyssey. During the day, Penelope weaves a funeral shroud for Laertes, tells her suitors she will pick a new husband only when she has finished it. Then at night, she unweaves her work, delaying the moment she must marry again.
Kat was drawn to the myth, exploring “the power of reclaiming through taking things apart and rebuilding, remaking them.” The installation will feature an abstracted wall of yarn, created through weaving, net-making and knitting. Old TOAST garments will be made into weights, echoing ancient loom stones. “I’m using the symbolism of weaving, but more abstractly as a theme,” she says.
On the morning we speak, Kat has already been in the studio with her 10-year-old daughter, who has begun helping her with a cocoon panel. “She’s just gotten to the age where she can really start to contribute in the studio,” Kat says. The community in the neighbourhood is supportive. She sources wool from local farmers nearby, and people know she collects unusual materials - recently someone gave her boxes of old horse tack and bridles which she plans to use for a future installation. “There’s a magic to this place,” she says of Kingston. “It’s a different, weird kind of place and I love that.”
Words by Alice Simkins Vyce.
Photography by Youn Jung Kim.
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