Banner images: Christina A. West (left) and Katie Hudnall (right). Courtesy of the artists.

By: Francis Oliver

Katie Hudnall fashions fantastical furnishings, Christina A. West renders belonging and alienation

The first visiting artists of the 2023 - 2024 academic year build unexpected moments in functional objects and in mixed media installations subverting the audience's gaze

Katie Hudnall, Container for a Lost Year, 2021, full view and detail view. Image courtesy of the artist.

Next week, the Lamar Dodd School of Art welcomes two visiting artists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose practices overlap in tongue-in-cheek installation. Katie Hudnall, associate professor in woodworking and furniture, and Christina A. West, associate professor in ceramics, will deliver back-to-back public lectures on their career trajectories in manipulating 3-dimensional forms and viewer expectations.

Join us on Tuesday August 29 to hear Hudnall speak about translating detailed fantastical drawings into surreal drawers, chairs, and other functional objects. Return the following day, on Wednesday August 30, to hear West speak on probing into the act of looking and gendered characterizations of strength, beauty, and vulnerability through ceramics, sculpture, and video.

Both lectures take place at the Lamar Dodd School of Art on 270 River Road in room S150 at 6 PM and are free and open to the public.  

• Visiting Artist Lecture —  Katie Hudnall  —  August 29, 6 PM
• Visiting Artist Lecture  —  Christina A. West  —  August 30, 6 PM

Learn more about Hudnall's and West's practices below.

Christina A. West, Napoleon, mere mortals Series, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

“I am tapping into the delight that comes from seeing something work that shouldn’t, the hope that comes from a thing endlessly repaired, no matter how many times it has broken, and the beauty in something textured with imperfections and then worn smooth through use.”
-Katie Hudnall

“My site-sensitive, immersive installations engage viewers as both voyeur and subject; it is common for mirrors, video feeds, or openings cut through walls to implicate viewers into the work in a visually explicit way, conflating the roles of actor and audience to disrupt the illusion of an omnipotent one-sided gaze and highlight the fact that we (humans) move through the world as both subject and object.”
-Christina A. West

Katie Hudnall is an artist, woodworker and educator living in Madison, Wisconsin where she is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and runs the Woodworking & Furniture Program. She has a BFA in Sculpture from the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC and an MFA in Woodworking/Furniture Design from Virginia Commonwealth University. She makes other-worldly, interactive, furnitural objects intended to solve problems both real and imagined and, sometimes, they do.

Christina A. West is an artist whose practice is rooted in politics of the gaze, using sculpture, video, and photography to focus on the male body. West earned her MFA from Alfred University (Alfred, NY) in 2006 and BFA from Siena Heights University (Adrian, MI) in 2003. After living in Atlanta for thirteen years where she taught at Georgia State University, West recently relocated back to the Midwest where she is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Clay & Conversation with Christina West and Chris Rodgers, YouTube video published by The Clay Studio, April 7, 2023.

Virtual Studio Tour with Artist Katie Hudnall, YouTube video published by Smithsonian American Art Museum, December 8, 2022.

About the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series

The Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture series has brought over 80 distinguished guests to the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia since 2002. Visiting Artists and Scholars spend three days on campus interacting with students and faculty, the culmination of which is a public lecture on the subject of the artist’s or scholar’s work.