We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kathy Ross a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Kathy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?

I once accidentally made a Borg. At least that’s what I was told. What’s a Borg? At first i thought: what! this was supposed to be Real Art. Then i finally thought: what do I care who likes it? Is a museum boss better than a science fiction freak? Its NICE when people like what you are doing. I dont need to be Michaelangelo. BTW they did give it the sculpture award at the sci fi convention. So I guess it was a borg.

I ve enclosed an image of the piece.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I called my last exhibit (Fogue Studios and Gallery, Seattle WA) : Over the Top And Under the Surface… On the surface my art looks pretty detailed, even decorative, even cute sometimes. The essence of: over the top. So thats on the outside, And that’s far enough in for alot of people. and really I do make some art that dead ends right below the surface. But my favourite work doesn’t stop there. Usually there is a lot of hidden detail, secret compartments, backstory. Then, I might lose people at the blood and guts level, way in there. Anyway, unless you re paying attention, you might not notice the undercurrents. Though hidden in plain sight, swimming through a sea of detail.

Like alot of our childhoods, mine was a sort of mix of idyllic and horrific. My sister looked at it all, and she thought: I can fix this. And she tried. I looked at it and thought this is way too big a job for me. So i just stayed out from underfoot and made my own secret little worlds

(My favourite thing at that time was to draw whole lot of tiny people climbing all over a flowering plant. I always loved teeny stuff.)

My sister eventually became a school principal. I still am making the artifacts of my own little worlds. Staying out from underfoot, in the woods, on Harstine Island.

They did have art classes where I grew up (rural Southern Ontario). But it was like: newsprint, and some crayons or powdered tempora paints with a couple of colours missing. No clay, nothing 3-d. no printmaking, no decent glue. Only things like flour and water, which is pathetic.

When I was about 18, I went after a bar of soap with a nail file, carved an intricate head. It was like when Dorothy arrives in OZ and everything is suddenly in colour. Art as sculpture, made a whole new kind of sense to me.

In 1976 I found some salty but colourful fabric scraps blowing around on a beach in Spain. I got a needle and some red thread, a pair of scissors and started making dolls. This turned into a retail doll business, and other soft sculpture.

I’ve managed to be self- supporting, self employed since 1978, always by making something you could loosely call art. In retrospect some kind of miracle that I never had to have an actual J.O.B. I’ve world my way through a million different materials and processes — cloth, paper, clay, bronze, performance art, installation, printmaking, found objects….I’ve exhibited and sold art in galleries, museums, shops, the Pike St Market, art festivals, retail, wholesale, online, offline. Currently an email newsletter. Ive never wanted to grow my business. I’ve always been a one-person operation. As much as I didnt want to be an employee I didnt want to be an employer either.

You dont want to quit one business before you have something to take its place. So I overlapped these mediums and markets. For a while I was making dolls and selling them wholesale, making paper mache for art festivals, and selling bronze in galleries.

I gave up on pursuing galleries around the same time the doll business fell apart, and took the bronze or tin to the higher end art festivals too. Sometimes I split my booth in half — one side bronze, one side maps

The bronze —or tin—sold as well as it had in galleries — same people like the art , but there are more of them at a fair, and you don’t have to give anybody 50%. I can sell my work better than any body else can.

I wanted to live in my art self —because what’s great about art is the creativity, healing, freedom, introspection— the way that, at the centre of it, NO rules apply.
I’ve always fought to maintain my creative freedom and to keep from drowning in the commercial pressure of making a living:

I split my day between work that I really want to do and work that needs to sell. Commercial considerations not allowed to enter into the art I do before noon.

I Split my art self into 3 personas, which are not allowed to interfere with each other.
1. the idea self (I spend alot of time thinking and sketching and doodling and writing)
2. making art in various stations in my house
3. destination. (eg sales, or gifts, or, especially now that I’m getting social security, exhibits in non commercial spaces like college galleries etc)

Also I do a lot of attitude management. I’m aware of unhelpful negative self-talk. I am very forgiving. I do not strive for excellence. (how would I even know if i got there?) I don’t obsess about whether Im doing art or craft. I am not a perfectionist, though I pretty much finish all projects just out of curiosity. I’m not very ambitious. I mean of course I wouldn’t turn down a big NYC museum show (If that ever came up!) but I’m happy with doing an art talk for my local community centre too.
I am a perpetual motion machine. Always have many projects in process, different media, some short term, some long term, huge backlog of ideas. I LOVE making up a million ideas I will never get to.

But I’m capable of jumping thru the hoops you have to jump thru to get into art festivals, juried art shows, gallery or museum exhibits. Rejection doesn’t even hurt my feelings, as long as it comes in the form of an email or letter. I don’t like it face to face.

I know my story would be so different if I weren’t white, class-privileged, college educated. If I didnt have good health, passable social skills. And how would things have gone differently for me if I were male, or heterosexual, or if I’d gone to art school? And maybe my whole self-employed art life would not be possible in the current art-unfriendly economy. I work hard too of course. I don’t look like it but I’m pretty organized and efficient and sensible.

Also by the way if the art world wants to be more inclusive they should prioritize women/queer/BIPOC curators, teachers, history, directors, students, exhibitors, etc.
And they need to learn how to look at inexpensive portfolios, inexpensive photography. Worry less about “professional presentation” and more about actual creativity. (Also, framing is a racket. I am a founding member of the Thumbtack Liberation Front. )

(By the way: advice re: applying to high end art festivals. You get to submit 4 images. Here’s what you send in: one shape in four different colours. OR one colour, with four shapes. PLUS: it’s not an art jury — it’s mostly a photography jury. Fit their box. There will be more leeway at the festival than in the jurying. And way way more leeway on the inside of your head. Don’t let them get in there.)

Everybody is an artist. It is CRIMINAL that people say all the time: I don’t have a creative bone in my body. Of course we all do. If it wasn’t all hammered out of us in so many ways. And art needs to be everywhere all the time.

Here’s a comment on a recent art talk:
I am so happy to have seen the exhibit and enjoyed immensely your interactive talk: brilliant: the notes with questions, keeping everyone on their toes and
highly engaged. I revel in the depth of your insight into self and world,
and your unmitigated originality.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In 1993/4 I was working on Apple Pie, an art installation about alternative families. Portraits of mixed race/queer/disabled/alternative families. It involved a big square of house shapes, interviews, hands cast in plaster, their shoes, some photos of them eating apple pie, a sound track. I was pretty happy to get an opportunity to show a video of the work in progress to the director of the Seattle Art Museum. But then he said that he didn’t think it was very well made. I was pretty devastated and embarrassed. But, that afternoon, right after I left SAM, I took all the pieces from another installation I was working on, and set it up against a cement wall that made a good backdrop. Spent the afternoon photographing variations. And of course I showed Apple Pie in several places over the next couple of years.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Art is by its nature free and equal. Even if the culture tries to pretends only some people can make art (based on class race and gender bias). No matter what ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to exhibit or sell your art, and when you peel back all the bias, all the commercial transactions, you can just know that art at its centre is a free and equal zone where no rules apply. And how utterly rude to cram hierarchy and judgment and exclusion on top of this creative energy. Which is some of the best, most healing, most rewarding energy in the universe. So if somebody is knocking at your front door with a sales pitch about promoting your brand, you can just slam the door in their face and go right out your back door into the limitless free wilderness of your imagination. And this is exactly what I always want to support and build and protect.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.krtins.com www.vimeo.com/kr3d
• Instagram: kathyross3d
• Facebook: kathyross3d

Image Credits
Ann Coppel, Uli Johnson, Lynn Thompson