Katie Vota utilizes pattern-based tapestry as an experimental drawing medium to explore the multitudes of change in the world around her, ranging from large-scale connections surrounding water as a shifting, living entity, to the small, minute changes centered within the body as she meets her own on the day-to-day. It all comes back to this—to change and transformation.

Her 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 specificity feels akin to larger observations of the sun sparking off the water, or the moon reflecting its face. Her new Jacquard woven works start with research photos taken from the monitor stations surrounding the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, transformed finally as woven collages layered over with highly ornamental, often ostentatious patterns. She juxtaposes the beautiful idealization of these images with the living reality of our polluted water systems and the shifting faces of our shores as our climate continues to change.

Within Vota’s work, the imperfection of the reflected image of the moon and the attempt to repeatedly weave (albeit imperfect) circles is embraced with all its messy complications. In this, the moon is a symbol for the queer body in change, reassuring in the idea she retains her essence through it all. As our perceptions of self shift through lived experience, our bodies change to meet the actions we take. Our gender perception shifts from day to day, the place we meet ourselves as women cycles and no two days are the same. The cyclical, phasing of the moon is a study in transformation –moments of change, captured. It wanes and waxes, strong enough to shift the tides yet delicate and shining in our perception. Its image distorts and morphs. The weavings follow suit—zooming in, eclipsing—a study of the partial within the whole. For this work, Vota utilizes compound weave structures that are a mix of seen and unseen. These structures contain multiple threads and they collapse or “compound,” so the viewer only sees part of the whole, much like the images themselves. As this body of work continues, the circles become more abstract, more improvisational, striking a balance with imperfection that marks the hand in the work. Perfectly human, perfectly queer, perfectly beautiful.