Schutte

KATIE SCHUTTE

Bio

Katie Schutte was born and raised in Ohio. Her work is the result of combining crochet with various jewelry, painting, and sculpture techniques. As a child, she often saved up to purchase jewelry making kits and taught herself to crochet in high school. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art from Kent State University in 2006 and her Master of Fine Art from Miami University in 2011. While at Miami, she taught Jewelry and Metalsmithing courses to students from various majors and received several grants and awards. Her work has been shown in exhibitions organized by the Enamelist Society, the Ohio Craft Museum, and the Rock Island Art Guild, among others. She had a solo show at the Nohr Gallery on UW-Platteville’s campus, and her work was included in Envision Arts’ digital exhibition Art in Isolation: A Contemporary Collective, and in the book Mastering Contemporary Jewelry Design, released in April 2020. She currently lives in Platteville, Wisconsin with her husband and a collection of cats.

Artist Statement

Uniting unrelated areas of artistry is the main catalyst behind my work. I focus on utilizing crochet techniques as methods for working with materials and processes associated with jewelry, sculpture, and painting. Limiting my artistic practice in such a manner could be viewed as confining but continuing to engage with this self-imposed boundary has proven to be a fulfilling experience and an inspirational guide in regard to my artistic output.

In the Memory series, paint is sprayed through and over antique, vintage, and artist made crocheted doilies. After the paint is applied, found fibers are then stitched and crocheted onto the paper substrate, breaching and altering its surface and edges. The doilies, originally recognizable objects, become distorted and inverted in the paint layers. Manipulated into new forms or altered by physical fiber stitches, the compositions re-create the doilies in a different medium. These distortions mirror how we relate to the past: we forget, remember incorrectly, recall certain pieces clearer than others, and evolve the event as we remember and retell it. The inversion, distortion, and alteration of the doilies with paint and fiber illustrate how memories will never be the actual event or even very reliable, but confined to being only an echo of it, or as an imprint that has been filtered and edited. ​

Katie Schutte, Memory XI, 2021,
Acrylic, stitched and crocheted fiber on paper, 38x26 in.,
Collection of the artist