Katie Schofield’s Subtle Art of Rural Reclamation

You will seldom see the nest of an oriole, or a pair of pileated woodpeckers flying low, unless you are extremely diligent and know just what to look for. Even then, such spectacles are rare gifts, phenomena mostly hidden by mazes of branches and brambles, found only by muddy paths, or by none at all.

Katie Schofield’s sculptures work like this; they light up one’s natural sense of wonder as we come upon them unexpectedly, in the woods or a field, or hidden high in the barn eaves. Silent and unassuming but undeniably present–like the uncanny awareness that something might be looking at you as you are looking–Schofield’s cocoons and nests and fungally growths make openings for the wonder that comes when we rediscover the constant colorful weavings of the world we don’t usually pay attention to.  In other words, we get to see what is usually hidden, right around us always but mostly beyond our habitual attention. Such revelations of the world’s elegant complexity are as humbling as they are wondersome.

Schofield’s materials are the ordinary detritus of modern rural life: synthetic baling twine and shopping bags, cast-off feed sacks and plastic silage tarping. Into the sites where these materials are used and then disused, she imagines new forms for them, performing an imaginative integration whereby she weaves plastics and other inorganic materials into organically resonant forms. These forms remind us again of the surrounding world and its wonders that we might otherwise forget to admire.