Katie Schutte

I combine crochet, a fiber technique, with painting, sculpture, enameling, and metalsmithing, to weave together domestic craft and fine art meant for public display outside the home. Dualities inhabit my works, simultaneously invoking feminine/masculine, domestic/industrial, organic/artificial, antique/modern, clarity/distortion, past/present, and intimate/public. I use traditionally feminine and domestic craft techniques to stitch, crochet, and build upon and with industrially mass-produced materials and traditionally masculine media.

Like many fiber techniques, crochet is often pigeonholed as a quaint agrarian craft, traditionally women’s work done for family and domestic use, but unfit for consideration in highbrow fine art. To combat this, my various bodies of work run the gamut from utilizing crochet as the building blocks of the works’ form to the method for exploring structure, form, composition, and boundaries while incorporating texture and color and various combinations thereof. I also utilize antique, vintage, and self-made crochet doilies to explore layering and abstraction, particularly in the compositions of two-dimensional works. By building crochet into, around, and upon fine art, my artistic practice insists the value of this feminine craft be acknowledged and viewed as fine art.