“The varied positions of my body in the landscape create a shift in how I experience the world. In turning myself over to an enormous arc of wind, sky, and rock, I have a new way of seeing myself in the environment, and what initially seems odd and terrifying becomes overwhelmingly beautiful…. I become part of a larger whole, a place of grace.”
First of all, just to keep things truthful, I have never actually seen Kate Hodges work? (see last paragraph) Personally, I have seen only photographs, talked with Kate in a café on Broadway in Kingston, and that’s about it. Second of all, she is not actually from our Hudson Valley community, per se. She sometimes works here, as an artist’s assistant, returns to Vermont where she grew up, but calls Tucson, Arizona her home. Off to the dictionary I go. Community: aside from ‘a group of people living together in one place’, the Oxford expert writes, ‘a group of interdependent organisms of different species growing or living together in a specified habitat’- like, Earth, maybe. (see below)
When I first met Kate in a private mansion in the Roundout district of Kingston
she gave me an invitation to the 7th Biennial A.I.R. Gallery in Chelsea. On the front was a photograph of an amorphous figure floating against a backdrop of craggy mountains, wearing a white dress. “That’s me!” she explained. In a recent Molino Canyon series titled, Immersion, she takes ideas – flight, human partnerships, fear, freedom – all palpable things, and makes pictures of them after she has choreographed and designed for staging effects, spinning a personal metaphor, and then climbing inside rocky places or alongside the canyon walls. She wears a white, wedding-ish dress, stitched from synthetic Dacron. (“used to cover the wings of airplanes and represents flight, liberation and freedom.”) Instead of buttons, the spiky ends of the leaves of the desert agave plant are the finishing details. After many months of planning, off she sails, literally into the air - a sort of vision quest - where “art becomes (my) experience…watching a hawk flying over my head…..it’s primal…..bigger than ourselves..”
“What of the fear factor” I ask over coffee on Broadway, and her answer was not nearly as bold as the feats she performs, suspended by ropes from these huge canyons in Arizona, alone with her rope partner and a photographer. Shooing away the unnecessary on lookers, she goes about her work of inspecting things where probably only insects or reptilians have been and doing topsy turvy antics reminiscent of secret childhood play. At first she says there is no fear, just the sublime reality of shifting perspectives and feeling a part of “it”, i.e. the rattlesnakes, scorpions, mountain lions and such. But later on, she referred to some significant angst and a recognition that there are life threatening moments that clarify into “empowerment.” – or not, depending on your luck, I suppose. Oddly, it is not this tall bravery of hers that leaves your jaw agape, but the vulnerable querying soulful Kate, who’s art/ explorations are at home with all of it! And home is interdependent and relative to which precipice you’ve chosen at what moment, not to mention the gritty truth of who or what doesn’t add up to your own safety and which spiky things will protect you. (see above definition of community) She doesn’t “operate within the normal paradigm” and refers to the Tarot card hanged man reflecting a need to alter perspective in order to see clearly. About this dangling, upside down man, ‘coins fall from his pockets and as he gazes down on them – seeing them not as money but only as round bits of metal – everything suddenly changes ..as if he is hanging between the mundane world and the spirit world, able to see both…dazzling, yet crystal clear.’
Resilience and Resurrection, built in 2005 when Kate was a graduate student, as a tribute to a 2003 fire at Mt. Lemmon in the Catalina Mountains in Arizona, grabbed my interest. I consider it to be her raison d’etre, transforming confusion and darkness into hope. “I wanted to do something to remind people that even though we lose things, there’s this element of rebirth that comes out of that,” she told a reporter from the Arizona Daily Wildcat. For this work, Kate had two 30’ tall trees brought down from the disaster site and took the school year to carve designs into them and resurrect them with charcoal line drawings, “…in memory of the fire and help connect people in this community….”
The challenging thing for me about her work is a sort of anti-adaptation message – a suspicion that standing on two feet your whole life is, perhaps, a limitation. A bit of a character in her own novel, Kate fossilizes us in those dead trees, like the repetitious hand imprints in African caves paintings, connecting us to timeless, haunting images (is it blood or iron oxide they painted with?) Oh, and most of us will never actually see the remotely sited art of our ancestors.
Kate Hodges grew up in Vermont on an apple orchard that is presently operated by her brother and father. Her first “art school” was the land around the orchard and the barn where she often used found objects and made them into mixed media projects. Kate studied art at Colorado College and art history in Florence Italy and went on to receive her Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture in May, 2006. She worked in Curitiba Brazil at an orphanage teaching art and in Tegucigalpa Honduras at orphanages for disabled youth teaching sculpture. Last summer she received a commission from the Botanical Gardens in Sao Paolo Brazil to create a permanent tree sculpture. Check out Peter Miller’s award winning book, “Vermont Farm Women” which includes her work and experiences on the family farm as and artist and a farmer in 3 pages of interviews and photographs.
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