Water Everywhere and Nowhere
Katie Vota seeks to (re)evaluate our relationships to materiality, community, and environment through the medium of tapestry re-imagined in the digital age. Utilizing pattern-based tapestry as an experimental drawing medium, she explores 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.
Within her water works, 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 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. The end results are more poetic than literal, coming from a place of deep care and wonder for the world around us. 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.