Katie Vota seeks to (re)evaluate our relationships to materiality, community, and environment through the medium of tapestry re-imagined in the digital age. Via collecting cast-offs and scavenging colors from nature, she transforms materials to create wholes from smaller parts, finding softness in many forms, textures, colors and patterns based in cloth. Her current work utilizes pattern-based tapestry as a drawing medium to map the multitude of connections surrounding water as a shifting, living entity. The woven wave forms and seascapes are both real and imagined—the beating of the loom akin to the ebb/flow of the tides. In drafting weaving patterns, she creates her own waves and ripples, and this deep focus on pattern is akin to larger observations of the sun sparking off the water, or the moon reflecting its face. She juxtaposes the beautiful idealization of these images with the living reality of our polluted water systems.