Upcoming Studio Sale

Starting the First Weekend of November, I’ll be running a studio sale via my Instagram (@katie.a.vota). I did this last year, with much success, as a way to move some work I am no longer showing on to good homes, while also being able to offer more affordable pricing structures than what I use with galleries (as no one else is getting a cut of the sales).

Not only will I be selling artworks, but I’ll also be selling A LOT of naturally dyed yarns and a few studio tools I no longer use (including a vintage dress form!).

Recent Exhibitions

July 2025: "The Intersection of Here & Nowhere" an exhibition of liminal spaces woven from the fabric of urban lives featuring the works of Katie Vota and Julie Sulzen was up at Leslie Wolfe Gallery in Old Town, Chicago.

AMERICAN TAPESTRY BIENNIAL XV

Chase Gallery - Epiphany Center For the Arts
August 1, 2025  - September 26, 2025

This juried exhibition highlighted the best of contemporary hand-woven tapestry featuring work by artists from across the U.S. exploring the many artistic possibilities of the medium. Work in the exhibition included not only artists who work within more traditional definitions of tapestry but also those artists whose work expands upon the core principles of the medium as it explores new techniques and processes.

Studio Updates

In January 2025, I completed a Praxis Fiber Workshop Digital Weaving Lab residency in Cleveland, OH. This was my second DWL residency and I put 22 yards of warp on their 44” wide TC2. The weavings produced (14 in total) are a mix of works for ongoing my "Many Moons" series and my investigations in to woven ecologies via the Great Pacific Garbage Patch // my recent research into oil slick patterning and spread on water.

Process notes:

This work is part of a larger series translating photographs from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into large-scale woven tapestry. The works use beauty as a tool of activism, taking these scenes of trash-filled oceans and elevating them into haunting, ghostly images. Tabby-based patterning plays a role in creating the lush, opulent and textured color fields. In "Synthetic Reflections," the tabby itself is removed from the equation, leaving the patterns loose and floating. The frenetic mix of patterns create a glitchy texture, reinforcing the synthetic aspects of plastic miasma in our oceans.

Process notes:

Approaching this work as collage, this piece was mocked up in paper and then translated into a file for Jacquard TC2 in Photoshop. The vintage coverlet patterns, from the Shuttle-Craft Book of American Hand Weaving, were chosen to mimic the bifurcated circles, and the background overshot is based on a pattern by Bertha Gray Hayes. Once chosen, the patterns are squared in Weave-It and then re-squared in Photoshop for use in the weaving. The pattern layout for multi-color weaving with tabby on the Jacquard TC2 is my own design, and this is one of a series of weavings utilizing new squaring methodologies I'm developing for the TC2 specifically.

Upcoming Weaving Time

In July 2025 I had weaving time at LMRM Chicago on their brand new 29” weaving width TC2 Digital Jacquard loom. It had a white warp (which I never use) and I was excited to continue pushing the collage’d moons for that weaving time, as well as breaking my brain designing the file "backwards" to how I usually do it.

I’m taking their CMYK workshop with Heather Mackenzie this weekend, so I can work through the differences between the Woven Iridescent Echo I’m doing on my floor loom and CMYK, in preparation for my upcoming Praxis DWL Residency in 2026. In the mean time, I’ve got time to play on LMRM’s CMYK warp in December.

Ongoing Projects

As a part of my year-long participation in the Hyde Park Art Center's Center Program (for new work generation), I've begun a journey into Woven Iridescence as a means of representing oil spills on water.

 Within this work, I'm thinking about:

• mimicry of the natural/synthetic world

• the dissolution of the image / pattern as obfuscation

• glitch as rupture or refusal, a site for change (via Glitch Feminism by legacy Russell)

  • To embrace glitch, as failure and refusal, is to move towards possibilities for other ways of being, worlding, and collectivity beyond the logics of the gender binary, capitalism, and neoliberalism.

  • This includes:  Utopic envisioning, embodying malfunction, the error as a pathway to constructing better worlds, the queer ethos of yearning, system disruption, and the glitch as a ghost or background disruption.

• the psychic dissonance of finding Beauty as a generative space within topics of ugliness

• ideas of scale in relation to the body and how the work takes up physical space

The first foray into this work was at my DWL residency. For this I used patterns full of movement to mimic the swirls and whorls found in photographs of oil on water.

After much thought, I decided that the iridescence is one of the things that draws me most to this topic, so I shifted away from the TC2 loom back to my floor loom for a long-form study of woven iridescence. I've been using Marian Stubenitsky's "Echo and Iris" and "Weaving Max 8" books to help me with the drafting of woven echo (which structurally creates iridescence via color theory, structural pattern design, and light refraction). Turns out, the method of pattern tracking I've developed for mixing Overshot/Crackle/Summer and Winter weaving patterns on my floor loom is functionally the same as what I'd need to use for tracking a mix of echo variations, making it a fairly slight learning curve.

As I've woven, I've been developing a system to allow me to weave multiple panels without using a full cartoon and still have them line up in the end, as my loom only weave 36" comfortably.

 Along side process notes, I've also been marking down a list of the issues left to solve:

• Choosing appropriate Lighting for these works is going to be paramount

• Dark wefts show the iridescence better, however they also sadden the warp colors

• How will variegation affect pattern legibility?

• How to achieve feeling of "lightness" or floating/weightless quality of original source photos?

• Flow in space / organic shape vs yardage

The Hyde Park Art Center’s “Center Program” exhibition will open on Saturday, December 13, 2025 from 1-4pm. If you’re in Chicago, I hope to see you there.

We will be doing Artist Talks on MLK day in January 2026, as a part of the ongoing activations around the exhibition (more info TBD).

WEAVING STAPLES

Katie’s Finds for Endless Amounts of Weaving

▶ Music Obsession: Interplanetary Criminal Boiler Room set

▶ Podcast on repeat: Empire

▶ Current read: The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

▶ Must-have weaving book: The Shuttlecraft Book of American Handweaving

CAT SIGHTINGS

Or… Stefani and Francis Love Weaving

I’ve started calling them “studio assistants,” however if I’m honest they’re not super helpful

Francis loves to walk on things you’re trying to photograph.

Stefani has exquisite taste in yarn and loves to steal balls out of my weaving bench (and sometimes hide them).

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