KATIE HUDNALL

Katie Hudnall is an artist, woodworker and educator living in Madison, Wisconsin where she is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and runs the Woodworking & Furniture Program.  She has a BFA in Sculpture from the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC and an MFA in Woodworking/Furniture Design from Virginia Commonwealth University.  She makes other-worldly, interactive, furnitural objects intended to solve problems both real and imagined and, sometimes, they do.  

"I build large furnitural objects from small, rough, discarded bits of wood, sketching pieces together in three dimensions.  I don’t hide connections between parts and I leave traces of the intuitive processes used in making the work. These details become visual patterns and act as a record of the making itself, a map of the time that has gone into assembling and imbuing dumpster-rescued materials with worth through care and labor. 
 
Fragile looking and creature-like, my works are interactive storytellers. They transform everyday objects and moments into opportunities for delight and wonder, performing odd and unlikely functions that defy their seemingly precarious stances. In the Let Goer, a tall, friendly structure holds a maple seed 11 feet in the air that can be released with the press of a simple lever, allowing users to enjoy the 3 seconds it takes the seed to gently whirl to the ground. The maximal effort to minimal reward in each piece flips the script on our assumptions that efficiency and speed are always the preferred path no matter the actual goal. Instead, I am tapping into the delight in seeing something work that shouldn’t, the hope from a thing endlessly repaired, no matter how many times it has broken, and the beauty that comes from seeing so much effort and time dedicated to sharing moments of unexpected joy."