Katie Vota
Katie Vota, Sea Debris, 2024. Jacquard woven tapestry, mercerized cotton, wool, and plastic yarns, 27.5 x 21.5 in (69.85 x 54.61 cm).
KATIE VOTA (b. 1987) is a Chicago-based artist and educator creating large-form tapestries about the shifting nature of the body and its relation to our changing world. Vota received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2010) 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. She has exhibited at venues including Threewalls (Chicago), Mu Gallery (Chicago), Pratt MPW School of Art Gallery (Utica, NY), The Krasl Art Center (St. Joseph, MI), and The Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis). She is a Lenore Tawney Foundation Scholar, a two-time Chicago DCASE grantee, and has participated in residencies such as Praxis Fiber Workshop's Digital Weaving Lab Residency, Chicago Art Department’s “On Mending” think tank, and Crosshatch in Traverse City, MI.
Artist’s Statement:
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 sparkling 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.
Katie Vota, Float like a Ghost, 2024. Jacquard woven tapestry, mercerized cotton and wool yarns, 28 x 27 in (71.12 x 68.58 cm).
Katie Vota, Debris Floating, 2024. Jacquard woven tapestry, mercerized cotton and wool yarns, 27.5 x 24.5 in (69.85 x 62.23 cm).
Grant Statement:
Much of my new work utilizes the Jacquard Loom -- a type of digital loom that allows for specific and detailed drawings to be realized as tapestry. It's allowing me to work directly with reference images pulled from journalism and scientific research surrounding the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and allows me to conceptually to push my work on the changing face of water sustainability in the Anthropocene era. The drawback of this loom is that it is quite expensive to use. There is an open use facility in my city, however the cost of the loom is $25/hr plus $50/yard of warp utilized. I have time booked in July to do a large tapestry work — the biggest yet in the series — and with the time I have booked it will cost me $300 in time, $100 in warp material, and $200 in weft material. Added up, to make one 45” x 60” weaving in total is $600. I’ve offset it a bit by participating in their time offset work share, helping warp on in exchange for cost reduction but that will only reduce the cost $50-75. This leaves me with $525 to fund on my own.
To find more of her work visit her Instagram @katie.a.vota and website.
Thank you to everyone who applied! Our next artist grant open call is live now.