BIO

Katie Beatta Hovden Wolff (b. 1997) is an interdisciplinary artist working in printmaking, fibers, collage, and sculpture. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Black Hills State University in 2020 and her MFA in Studio Art from the Printmedia Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2023. She currently teaches in the Studio Art Department at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, SD. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

My studio practice is intuitive and interdisciplinary, guided by an exploration of materials (wax, plaster, fibers, wood, rusted metal, pigment), found objects, and the photographic image. The web of relationships between object, material, and image function as physical poems; meaning is hinged on an ecosystem of opacities, color, space, texture, and, most importantly, associations—both personal and collective.  

Time plays an integral role in my work and is present in the history embedded in the found objects themselves. On a thread of animism, the objects carry their past into the work, contributing physically and conceptually. Rust embodies the passage of time, wear and tear documents acts of use, and, as stated by Susan Sontag in her book On Photography, “all photographs are memento mori … all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

And it is precisely this “relentless melt” that points towards a universal grief of corporeality. A complicated relationship between bodies, objects, and time emerges; grief and joy are not opposites, but rather, inverses. Again and again, it is this intangible thread I attempt to follow through the act of making.

email: katiebhwolff@gmail.com, CV