Katie Holten is an artist and activist. In 2003, she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane. Her drawings investigate the entangled relationships between humans and the natural world. She has created Tree Alphabets, a Stone Alphabet, and a Wildflower Alphabet to share the joy she finds in her love of the more-than-human world. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Irish Times, New York Times, Artforum, and frieze. She is a visiting lecturer at the New School of the Anthropocene. If she could be a tree, she would be an Oak.
Katie, when I see a tree drawing now I cannot help but think of you! Can you tell us a little of what drew you to trees? Why they matter to you and why it felt important to create your first tree alphabet?
I’m not sure how to say it, but I’ve always felt more comfortable around plants than humans. I’m very quiet and often find being around people exhausting. Sorry humans!
In 2004, I moved to New York City on a Fulbright to research our relationship with “nature” in the city. It felt important for me to spend time in an uber-urban environment to see how our human nature was entangling, or unraveling, with the wider world. I’ve always felt very embedded on this planet, aware of how grounded here we are, hands and feet in the soil, sitting slowly outside with the wind, walking, watching plants grow, harvesting, composting. But I was sensing that many other people didn’t have any of that. Looking back now, it’s easy for me to see that I felt in my bones that something very fundamental was wrong with everything. At the time I just knew that it felt important, vital, to try and learn more about where our species was rushing towards, so I felt I had to go to a big city. And I also wanted, needed, to acknowledge that “nature” — which is also us, humans, so cities are nature — is what my work is about.
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