Katharine (Kate) Schutta’s artistic practice is an exploration of beauty, dread, intimacy, fragility and transgression, often realized through processes of photography, collage and assemblage. She culls crops, and realigns photographs and images from contemporary art and art history, science, technology, magazines, history books, and a vast collection that includes auction catalogues, home furnishing magazines, ecclesiastical journals. More recently, she has been integrating found objects, detritus, and scraps of nature, through various processes including rubbings, transfer techniques and a way of drawing that feels more like sculpting with graphite than rendering an image. She lives in Oak Park, not far from Thatcher Woods, part of the Cook County Forest Preserve. There, she often finds treasures that she photographs or tucks into her bag and takes back to the studio: spider webs, fencing wire, scraps of spray paint graffiti, wasps nests, dear and snake vertebrae. She. witnesses the handiwork of beavers, evidence of the cruelty of coyotes, and the aftermath of teenage and hobo parties. Back in the studio, she suspends some of the found objects from the ceiling, or lays them out on vast roles of paper where they cozy up to paper works – images of rooms, objects, torsos, etc.
Objects and images whisper, tremble, breathe.
https://www.instagram.com/kateschutta/