Katie Hudnall: An Indirect Path

AN INDIRECT PATH Katie Hudnall

AN INDIRECT PATH

The Windgate Wood Residency had a profound affect on my work, and my career. For four months, my paying job was to hang out in a beautifully equipped wood shop, surrounded by smart, interested students, and make whatever I wanted. It’s the kind of scenario an emerging artist dreams of.

For someone who builds intuitively, as I do, uninterrupted studio time is critical. There’s a kind of momentum that builds when you are able to spend twelve hours a day, seven days a week devoted to your work. The connections I made, the strange, new directions my pieces took during the residency were a direct result of the time and space I was given. Of course, not everything I made during my time in Madison was a success, but that’s a big part of why it was such a remarkable experience, I was given the time and space not only to make, but to experiment, fail and try again.

My sincerest thanks to Tom Loeser, the head of the wood program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who invited me in the first place. Also to Heath Matysek-Snyder, the gentleman running the program during Tom’s tenure as Chair of the Art Department at UW-Madison. Heath sat patiently on the floor of the wood shop and talked to me about work and life on more than one occasion.

To the graduate students who took me in and made me part of their family-Maggie, Ted, Nic, Hong Tao, Jason, and Ben-you are excellent makers, thinkers and friends. Thanks also to Travis Townsend, whose work I’ve admired for years, and whose essay gave me insight into my own work.

And, of course, a huge thanks to the Windgate Foundation, who funded this opportunity and who fund many others like it around the country. If the face of the Craft community seems to have gotten a little younger or more diverse in recent years, it is thanks, in large part, to their contributions.

Katie Hudnall

Personal Statement

Building larger furniture-like objects from small, rough, discarded bits of wood, I sketch pieces together. There’s intensity and an odd sense of worth in something that has been cobbled together from smaller parts. I don’t hide the connections, and I leave traces of attempts and failures to make something work-an odd map of the logic and processes used to assemble the piece.

These pieces are often fragile-looking, precariously balanced on spindly legs or bases that rock. Each performs some odd function, opening the door on one opens the umbrella-like structure coming out of the top of another. The system of pulleys and rope that makes that action possible is as cobbled together as the piece itself, and seems destined to fail, as the whole thing seems destined to collapse. I am tapping into the delight that comes from seeing something work that shouldn’t.

What to make of

An Indirect Path?

Imaginative, a bit cantankerous, yet strangely elegant, Katie Hudnall’s recent woodworks reveal themselves, and their atypical functions, in many layers. There are the spindly-legged figure-like gestures to consider, as well as the exposed joinery, nuanced surfaces and drawings that hint at a past life. And then there are the moveable parts that don’t quite explain why the objects exist. As the viewer inspects this idiosyncratic furniture, he or she wonders about the maker and the meanings suggested by their apparent use.

2009 was a busy year for Hudnall, and as an admirer of her work it was exciting to watch both her creations and her career take off in their own unique ways. The year began with her teaching at VCU (her alma mater) while making new furniture for a list of upcoming exhibitions.

Images of Hudnall’s work were published in two books on contemporary furniture and she garnered two exhibition awards from the Society of Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA. She led a panel discussion at the summer Furniture Society conference in Boone, NC, before ending the year in Madison, Wisconsin as the first recipient of the Windgate Wood Residency. There, during the fall semester at the University of Wisconsin, she created a new group of furniture objects for An Indirect Path, a December solo show at the Art Lofts Gallery.

Containing the fresh line of experimentation, the nine works included in An Indirect Path are close to sketchy. Developed from drawings and intuitively constructed from numerous thinly band-sawn wooden parts that often support a cabinet-type of box, these pieces of furniture have a compelling, toy-like, functional language. The assembly of many individual parts, the seemingly animated appendages, and the arrangement of the finished works in the gallery, all contribute to a busy, but certainly not hurried aesthetic. And these intelligent, but decidedly low-tech,

By Travis Townsend

Katie Hudnall’s contraptions invite close observation. The slats are weather worn, the support structures have a patina of paint and other marks, and the exposed nails, screws, pegs, and wingnuts hint at the processes and meaning of making things by hand.

Hardware Observatory stands on a scaffold of three thin legs. The bent boat- shaped box leans back, and when opened, reveals its meticulously organized cargo. Like two other works in this exhibition, Hardware Observatory has a small window of glass that allows for peeping into the interior space before deciding whether to open it. Symbiosis #2: Test Cabinet starts at the floor with five spidery legs and continues upward with a single and unexpectedly shifting line of worn and painted boards. It culminates with a small and slatted rectangular cabinet connected with string and pulleys to a functioning umbrella frame that opens and closes with the movement of the door. And conjoined at a wobbly- wheeled base, Symbiosis #3: Pair of Cabinets consists of two tall and thin cabinet forms. The cabinet on the right is taller than the left and, curiously, each cabinet can be truly vertical only when the other is tilted. Seemingly renovated with multiple small wooden patches, the raw orange-colored slats and patinated washers and screw heads create an interesting visual rhythm across the flat fronts. String zig-zags through multiple pulleys to make each cabinet’s fabric-less umbrella crown operate with the opening of the opposite cabinet door.

For whom are these furniture pieces created? Well, that’s not entirely clear. But as these peculiar works are opened up and examined, one might find that they say something about the attempt to make from humble materials a less ordinary life. And, at times, they seem to humorously comment on the human condition. Hudnall’s work might even allow some viewers to reconnect with the joyful imagination of childhood. Lurching lazily across the floor to create a table, shifting back and forth on wheeled teeter-totter bases while viewers operate skeleton umbrellas, or crankily perched on a pedestal studying screws with a magnifier, these pieces suggest not so common interpretations of everyday stories. The works in An Indirect Path are visually, physically, and intellectually open for investigation. But they are nuanced works made by a serious maker. Exploring territory beyond the merely expressive, Katie Hudnall has constructed her own inventive path in contemporary furniture.

World’s Longest Drawing Table, 2008 found and fabricated wood, found adding machine paper, pencil, hardware, copper 5’6” x 18’ x 14”

“Table” unfurls from 10’ to 18’ allowing the user to unroll the paper at one end and draw uninterrupted for 18’.

Dancing Tables, 2009 found wood, paint, oil, wax, found hardware 34” x 28” x 20”

Hardware Observatory, 2009 found wood, paint, oil, wax, lens found hardware 5’6” x 10’ x 18”

The lid opens to a 90째 angle, allowing the user to access the hardware, and a small shelf swings out from below the lens so that each piece can be set up and viewed through it.

Symbiosis #3: Pair of Cabinets found wood, paint, oil, wax, hardware, wire, string 7’2” x 26” x 12” 2009

The door on the right cabinet operates the umbrella skeleton on the top of the left cabinet (when the door opens, so does the umbrella) and vice versa.

Symbiosis #2: Test Cabinet, 2009 found wood, paint, oil, wax, hardware, wire, string 7’ x 38” x 26”

The door on the box operates the umbrella on top (when the door opens, the umbrella opens).

Wall Cabinet w/ Experiments, 2009 found wood, paint, oil, wax, hardware, wire 38” x 7” x 6”

Katie Hudnall b. 1979 www.katiehudnall.com chudnall@murraystate.edu 804 387 2932 Education 2005 Virginia Commonwealth University, MFA Furniture Design/Woodworking 2001 Corcoran College of Art and Design, BFA Fine Arts/Sculpture Exhibitions 2010 Artifact Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada Curated by Michael Hosaluk Crystalline Justice Patton-Malott Gallery, Snowmass, CO

2007 34th Annual Toys Designed by Artists Show Jeannette Edris Gallery, Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR Juried by Robert Ebendorf 2006 Show Us Your Drawers Indianapolis, IN Juried by Vladimir Kagan, Mark Leach, and Rosanne Somerson Faculty Selects Show Indianapolis, IN 2005 Material Matters: A Poetics of Possibilities Zone Chelsea Gallery, New York, NY Curated by Dr. Howard Risatti

Studio Furniture: The Next Generation Minneapolis, MN Curated by Dean Wilson, Tom Loeser and Cory Robinson

MFA Thesis Exhibition Anderson Gallery, Richmond, VA

2009 An Indirect Path (Solo Show) Art Lofts Gallery, Madison, WI

Awards/Honors 2010 Contributing Artist EMMA International Artist Collaboration Big River, Saskatchewan, Canada

Art and Artifice Sawhill Gallery, Harrisonburg, VA Curated by Howard Risatti and Steven Glass Transformation 7: Raphael Prize Finalist Exhibition Pittsburgh PA Juried by Craig Nutt, Michael Monroe, Cathy Raphael, Margaret Raphael and Kate Lydon Women in Wood Sandra J. Blain Gallery, Gatlinburg, TN LEAP Award Finalists Exhibition Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, PA Juried by Gail Brown, Jamie Adams and Kate Lydon 2008 Sleight of Hand Gallery 5, Richmond, VA Juried by Kathy Emerson, Natalya Pinchuck and Stephen Glass Here and Now: Would and Would Not Quirk Gallery, Richmond, VA 35th Annual Toys Designed by Artists Show Jeannette Edris Gallery, Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR Juried by Brent Skidmore Furniture Society Member’s Gallery Purchase, NY

Resident Artist Anderson Ranch Art Center Snowmass, CO 2009 Resident Artist Windgate Wood Residency University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI Honorable Mention, Raphael Prize Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, PA Juried by Craig Nutt, Michael Monroe, Cathy Raphael, Margaret Raphael and Kate Lydon Honorable Mention, LEAP Award Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh PA Juried by Gail Brown, Jamie Adams & Kate Lydon 2008 Best in Show, Sleight of Hand Exhibition Gallery 5, Richmond, VA Juried By Kathy Emerson, Stephen Glass and Natalya Pinchuck Purchase Award, 35th Annual Toys Designed by Artists, Arkansas Art Center Little Rock, AR Juried by Brent Skidmore

2007 Virginia Museum of Fine Art Fellowship/Grant Richmond, VA Juried by Lorie Mertes 2005 Work Study Scholarship Penland School of Crafts

MFA Thesis Exhibition Exhibition Catalog Virginia Commonwealth University Style Weekly, Space Planners: VCU’s Exiting MFA Students Break Boundaries, Paulette Roberts-Pullen June 2005, no. 23

Conference Assistantship Furniture Society 2004 Graduate Teaching Assistantship Virginia Commonwealth University Publications 2010 500 Cabinets Ray Hemachandra and John Grew Sheridan Lark Books 2009 Studio Furniture: Today’s Leading Woodworkers Tina Skinner Schiffer Publishing Design Book Eight: Scott Gibson, Taunton Press, pages 100-101 2008 Fine Woodworking’s Furniture: 102 Contemporary Designs Taunton Press, pages 106-107 Here and Now: Would and Would Not Exhibition Catalog Quirk Gallery And the Crafts Department of Virginia Commonwealth University 35th Annual Toys Designed by Artists Exhibition Catalog Arkansas Arts Center 2006 Show Us Your Drawers Exhibition, Catalog Furniture Society Studio Furniture: Focus On Materials Volume 4 Furniture Society Annual 2005 Material Matters: A Poetics of Possibilities Exhibition Catalog Zone Chelsea, w/ essay by Dr. Howard Risatti

Experience 2010 Assistant Professor of Art Murray State University Wood Program Visiting Artist/Lecturer Herron School of Art, Indianapolis University-Purdue University Indianapolis Visiting Artist/Lecturer Oregon College of Art and Craft 2009 Visiting Artist/Lecturer Minneapolis College of Art and Design Visiting Artist/Lecturer University of Wisconsin, Madison Moderator/Presenter, Four Stories: An Emerging Artist Presentation Furniture Society Conference Boone, NC with Elizabeth Spotswood, Alexander, Yuri Kobayashi and Sylvie Rosenthal 2008 – 10 Cooperative Studio Director Laboratory 307 Richmond, VA 2008 Visiting Artist/Lecturer, VCU and Quirk Gallery with Andy Buck and Karl Burkheimer 2005 – 09 Fabricator Eco Supply Center Richmond, VA 2004 – 09 Adjunct Faculty Virginia Commonwealth University, Furniture Design/Woodworking Department Richmond, VA 2003 – 10 Furniture Society Member

This work was produced in the woodshop at the University of Wisconsin, Madison while Katie Hudnall was the Windgate Wood Resident, during the Fall of 2009.

The Windgate Wood Residency is generously funded by the Windgate Foundation. c Katie Hudnall. All rights reserved.

No part of this may be reproduced without the Artist’s consent.

Photographs courtesy of: Dabney Taylor Dabney Design by: Kevin Duffy at ENOUGH! enough–enough.com