Featured Artist – Katey Rissi

Q & A

Q: Tell us a little about your art.

A: I am a printmaker, herbalist, textile artist, and bookmaker. I have always been deeply interested in processes, especially alchemical ones, where this plus that creates something new altogether.  Analog photography, printmaking, botanical dyeing, and herbal medicine all are transformative in nature. I am moved by the mysteries of chemistry, in variables, in treading the line between precise formulations and intentional imprecision yielding unexpected outcomes.

Q:  What are your biggest influences?

A:  I am influenced heavily by place. I think of my work as practice for deepening my own relationship with plants and place, and a way to investigate how we as a people hold these relationships at large.

Q: Does your work comment on current social or political issues?

A:  Thematically, my work is for and about the Anthropocene – the epoch we are currently in, defined by human impact on the Earth. I use process-based mediums to explore environmental grief. My work explores the complexity and contrast of ecological systems interacting with the built environment, the ways we hold memory, the complexity and tension in how we document, categorize, and define the natural world as our actions destroy it.

Q: Where would you like to go next?

A:  Recently, I have begun working at a larger scale in my textile work. This has been a really wonderful challenge and I am appreciating the way that working big impacts the themes I am exploring. I am also currently researching bioregional sources for color, which I hope to incorporate into my botanical dyeing practice.