Katie Hudnall” width=”970″ height=”719″ data-caption=’A preliminary drawing by Katie Hudnall. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy of Katie Hudnall</span>’>
Katie Hudnall’s interest in woodmaking stems from her childhood hobby of putting things together and taking them apart. “I was not a very good student when I was a kid, but I was good at drawing and puzzles,” Hudnall tells Observer. “When it came time for me to pick a career path, my dad very sweetly said, ‘You’re not very good at the rest of school—do you want to go to art school?’ and he helped me find an art school.” She attended Corcoran College of Art and Design, initially intending to focus on drawing, painting and illustration. Once there, she started drawing little illustrations of rooms full of creepy furniture in a style similar to Edward Gorey, and it wasn’t long before she realized that instead of just drawing them, she could make them. That’s how she moved into sculpture.
In her sculpture classes, Hudnall learned to create art with different materials, but she didn’t know how to manipulate wood until she took a job working for a sculptor who was also a woodworker. The sculptor and her husband, a furniture restoration artist, showed Hudnall how to build long-lasting wooden structures and recommended her for graduate studies. Hudnall went on to earn her master of fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University, developing her style as she learned to work with the material.
Many of her stylistic choices were pulled not from furniture but from industrial architecture and other built infrastructure. “A master of fine arts is not about making perfect objects. It’s about finding your visual voice: what is your style? What does your work look like? What do you want to say with it?” Hudnall explains. “The development of my style was much more complicated than a linear line from A to B; it was a process of trial and error.”
Wood interests Hudnall because of its ubiquitousness. “Everyone has a relationship with wooden objects. We all use things that are like our body, sized spoons, pencils, desks, chairs up to the buildings, and we all have this kind of relationship to it,” she says. That the material also has its own life written onto it, with the passing of years etched on every board in the pattern of rings, is something she finds particularly beautiful and inspiring.
Hudnall often uses recycled wooden objects in the making of her artwork. “People throw wood away all the time. I spend a lot of time climbing into dumpsters or stopping on the sidewalks and picking up old furniture and taking it back to my studio space to reassemble or reuse them.” She also looks for construction or house renovation sites and picks up discarded wood furniture. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches, has a tradition called Hippy Christmas in May when graduating students leave their furniture on the sidewalks for others to take. “There’s a lot of beautiful old material that gets thrown out every day because the pieces are too small or too big to be usable again, and I don’t mind taking the time or the labor.”
Hudnall sees wood as corresponding to the lifespan of human beings. Metal hardly shows traces of human use, and fabrics deteriorate too quickly, whereas wood carries the marks of a lifetime because of its unique density. “I can hold a wooden object like I’ve held a million times before, and I’ve worn it down to match my hand. But it’s not worn out. It’s just worn to suit me. So I like how it carries all the dents and the marks of where it’s been before.”
It takes a long time working in studios to produce the art that she makes. The title of Hudnall’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia, “The Longest Distance between Two Points,” is an allusion to the slowness of woodworking. “I think we have a tendency to equate speed and efficiency with good,” she says. “I wanted something to speak to the slowness and make space for that intentional slowness to be a good thing.” The longest distance also refers to her daily walking practices—she has been walking four to five miles a day for around seven years, and on those meandering walks, she collects things and reconnects with her body.
“My nickname is Snail because I’m really slow in my family. They’ve always called me Zippy the Wonder Snail very sweetly. The snail has become my champion for slowness, and I’ve been thinking about the spiral of the shell of a snail a lot. That made me realize that there’s no such thing as too slow. It’s just too slow in the wrong context.”
The longest distance between two points is a spiral, which also inspired the exhibition, which celebrates long, slow and non-directional paths. One of her favorite pieces in the show is a very tall, slender piece that holds a maple seed about ten feet off the ground. When one pushes a tiny lever, the artwork drops the maple seed, which then spins all the way to the ground. Hudnall is fascinated by the mechanics of everything, from how doors open on their hinges to the way a latch works with a spring inside. She usually starts a piece by sketching illustrations and mechanisms in her sketchbook and then creates the actual structure to see its three-dimensional visual effect. Her work turns an idea of a simple movement into a complicated wooden structure through the process of building and rebuilding.
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“I drew a monster holding that maple seed on my sketch board. I first made a structure that was too big, and it crushed the seed, so I kept making it more and more slender. Then, I thought I needed a structure to go up in the air, but the piece turned out to be too straight and didn’t have the movement that I wanted. So I cut it in half, moved a piece, and screwed it back on.” The finished work has a heavy bottom for structural support and a visual sense of grounding but resembles a big animal holding a maple in the air.
Hudnall enjoys creating interactive pieces that let people touch and move fragile things. Just like society says everything should be fast, culturally, we make things that are overbuilt and strong. “People don’t get to work with fragile stuff very much. So I wanted to build a small, beautiful detail that allows people to have this gentle moment, as it takes almost no push of this lever to release this little seed.”
Because wood is such a familiar part of people’s lives, they’re not scared to approach her works and are always interested in feeling the warmth and beauty of the material. They want to open drawers or press a button. “I enjoy wonderful conversations with very young kids who are always fascinated by the pieces,” she says. “They always ask the greatest questions like ‘Is this furniture? What does it do? Why did you make them?’” Her works also tend to appeal to people with engineering backgrounds, who are quick to comment on how her mechanisms work.
Of course, as much as Hudnall loves to provide space for people to touch the work, it’s not always feasible. When it’s not, she either creates demonstration videos so people can see the movement or trains gallery docents to operate the pieces. She has had artwork come back from shows broken, but it doesn’t faze her. Once repaired, that experience becomes part of the piece. “I think it’s more beautiful if it gets repaired and goes back out and does the thing again.”
It’s obvious that Hudnall’s works are deeply connected to wonder and joy. “I’m easily delighted by the things that happen around me, like light coming through a window and hitting a staircase. A lot of people sort of walk by so many moments like that and don’t get delight from it,” she says. “Things right now are collectively very hard, and I hope my work can remind people to exercise their joy muscles and wonder muscles to capture the beauty of life.” The piece that drops the seed, for example, was inspired by the fact that so many people stop paying attention to small, wonderful things—it gets people to notice that joyful three seconds in such a way that they cannot ignore it. In other words, Hudnall made a huge, weird, 11-foot-tall creature to force us to pay attention to a three-second moment of beauty.
When Hudnall went to art school, she got the impression that artists have to be serious and high minded, and art will be best received if it is academic or very sad with themes of trauma or loss. “It took me a long time to realize that one of the things that I had to offer was, in fact, my absolute love of being alive,” she says. “I love my life, I love moving through my life, and I know that that’s privilege, luck and a lot of other things, too, but it’s also nice to remind people that things are impossible, hard, weird and terrible, but also beautiful.”
After teaching in universities full-time for fifteen years, Hudnall finds that an important overlap between her practice and her teaching is the accessibility of her artwork. People never refuse to participate in her art because it is too academic, and her works can engage people on different levels—the mechanisms, wood’s materiality or the forms and shapes. Similarly, the playful aspects of woodworking let young art students explore a path without having to figure everything out. There is always so much technically to learn about woodworking, from carving to doing joinery, which takes students in many different directions, and even if they don’t focus on woodwork later in their careers, Hudnall believes they will use those skills in their lives in some way.
Over the years, Hudnall has seen the woodworking community grow more diverse. When she started college, it was almost exclusively male, but now she teaches a mix of female, male and queer students, and her colleagues are similarly diverse. Though woodworking is often seen as a solitary, introverted craft, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s woodworking community is an important part of the art department, providing frames, pedestals and assembly help—all of which her students take pride in. Despite social media’s negative reputation, she sees it as a valuable tool woodworkers can use to connect. Thanks in part to it, “I realized that I was not the only woman in wood making, and I can see so many other people making their crafts.”
Asked whether she considers her work craft, design or sculpture, Hudnall says she doesn’t actively categorize it, as she sees little distinction between these labels. While such definitions might matter in school, she no longer feels compelled to choose. “I’m most comfortable in the craft community because I’m thinking very much about human scale when I’m making work. I think about the hand, movement and somebody interacting directly with this piece, just like they would on a piece of furniture,” she clarifies. “I think of myself as being a contemporary craft artist, as I don’t use traditional furniture techniques like dovetails in my work, but my pieces are all about working with my hands. I love all of those labels, and I will accept them all happily.”
