We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Katie Davis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Katie below.
Katie, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?
I’ve always been an artist, but I wish I would have known as a young mother (16 years ago) that I could ask for help and childcare. I wish I would have seen the big picture and realized that my studio practice was not something I had to fit around everyone else’s needs, or apologize for. I struggled with isolation and the frustration of not being able to create during those early years of motherhood. I wish I had prioritized my art making at that time, even though we were broke. Asking for childcare – or tapping into the resources around me – to get me into the studio would have been life-giving at that time, ultimately boosting my mental health & well being as an artist. Now I’m 44 years old, and I have a body of work titled “Feral Mother/Domestic Instinct” which was inspired by those years as a young, isolated mother with depression & anxiety. I’m in a much better place now. It’s very telling that my life as a full time art professor, full time artist, and full time mother feels less stressful than being a stay at home mom, with 3 kids under age 6! Having a creative career is hard, but it also energizes and centers me in a way that makes me feel whole and happy as a person. I wish I would have fought for it much sooner.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am a studio artist, with a focus on painting & installation. I use upcycled domestic textiles and materials in my work that layer with paint to create tactile, rich surfaces and spaces. I sell my work through commercial galleries and also from my instagram platform or studio. My work sometimes tells a story or narrative, but lately I’ve been returning back to formal abstraction and investigation of these domestic materials. For example, my family orders pizza every Friday night. I’m currently saving all the clean cardboard lids of these Friday night pizza boxes and using them for a new series of work. I’m collaging paint, fabric, and paper onto these pizza box lids. Sustainability is very important to my practice, as well as the tangible nature of these materials that hold our domestic memories.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
So, one of my sons has autism. He was diagnosed at age 4, and one of my “friends” at the time told me that he had autism “because you are an artist”. She told me that because I was a painter, my son had autism. It was one of the most hurtful and horrible things anyone has ever told me. I went home and cried, of course, but I later made a painting about those feelings and the way we judge mothers in our society. The painting is titled “Jocheved’s Embrace”, and it has an abstracted figure of a woman holding a child. I was thinking about Jocheved, the mother of Moses, who saved her son’s life by sending him down a river, in a basket. No doubt, she was judged too. I also used my kids’ bedsheets and other materials from my house in the painting. The act of making that painting was an act of resilience.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
I read a book titled “Night Bitch” by Rachel Yoder that felt like my story. It’s a fabulous novel for anyone who is trying to balance motherhood with a creative career. I also just love this quote by Sherrie Rabinowitz that says “Artists need to create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy”. I would say that my entrepreneurial philosophy is the mindset of abundance. I don’t think that there can’t be too much art, poetry, music and writing in the world. I don’t view other artists and small business creatives as my competition. I see us as a group and community who support one another, need one another, and we will always pull up another chair at the table to make room for one more.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.katiekdavis.com
- Instagram: @kdavisstudio