BIO

Katie Vota is a Chicago-based artist utilizing traditional textile techniques to create sculptural and woven dreamscapes that engage viewers in ideas of touch, pleasure, and the rolls we play in shaping the world around us. 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.

Vota received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2010, magna cum laude) and a Studio MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). She was awarded a US Student Fulbright Grant (’11-’12) to study traditions of Andean Back-strap Weaving and Natural Dyeing in Cusco, Peru, with the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco. Vota has exhibited in numerous solo and juried exhibitions, at venues including Threewalls (Chicago), Mu Gallery (Chicago), Pratt MPW School of Art Gallery (Utica, NY), The Krasl Art Center (St. Joseph, MI), The Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis), and Ignition Projects (Chicago). She is a Lenore Tawney Foundation Scholar, a Fulbright grantee, and has participated in residencies such as Praxis Fiber Workshop's Digital Weaving Lab Residency, CAC Field Work Residency, Chicago Art Department’s “On Mending” think tank, and Crosshatch (formerly the Institute for Sustainable Art and Natural Design) in Traverse City, MI.

In her newest work, she’s become fascinated with the connection between Indigo (a living color) and water as a living entity. The woven wave-forms and seascapes are loosely based on reality, however, weaving time is spent dreaming of beaches from times past and lost, low-tide walks yet to be taken, Jules Verne-esque adventures under the sea, and the shifting faces of our shores as our climate continues to change. In drafting weaving patterns, she creates her own waves and ripples, sea-foam and bubbles. The deep focus on pattern is akin to a larger observation of the sun sparking off the water, or the moon reflecting its face. As this work progresses, real flotsam and jetsam, tide-smoothed stones, and other found objects are brought in, juxtaposing the beautiful idealization of these images with the lived reality of our polluted water systems.