Kate Wolf

I am a self-taught artist using linocut to create and explore a sense of home and comfort. In my art I explore the minutia and intimacy of what life can look like as an asexual (ace) person. Public perception of asexuality tends to be cold, clinical, or absent; I saw nothing of myself in queer media until I was nearly thirty. In the No More Men series, I aim to give other ace people the chance to see themselves in art, and to show that an ace life can be full of light and adoration for the physical world. In some pieces, like Sleepless Nights, I create art to capture and tame the fear and isolation of being solo in a world where the expectation is to live in a romantic partnership. I often draw on literature and poetry for inspiration (including here Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi
and WH Auden’s The More Loving One), which help connect me with others’ explorations of how to live and love well.

My work contains repeated themes of botanicals and of celestial bodies. I enjoy incorporating the practical and symbolic uses of plants, such as the calming effects of stinging nettles, as a way of understanding and connecting the familiar world around me. I also love to study sky and space photography as another way of contextualising my own tiny place in the universe, and the enormity of what we do not understand.

Preparing a linocut requires a great deal of repetition (sketching, drafting, transferring the draft to the block, carving, printing). This repeated re-creation of the image becomes a visual and tactile practice of understanding what in my life I wish to bring to light, and how I want to share it with others.