There's a moment Kate Wood describes from childhood that tells you everything about how she works. She's six years old, just back from a Disneyland trip she hated, freshly devastated by Space Mountain, but genuinely lit up by the La Brea Tar Pits, specifically by an animation of a saber tooth cat dying in slow, prehistoric horror. She goes home and paints it. Hot dog bun body. Hot dog bun legs. Black puddle of tar. "I felt amazing while making this painting," she says. "I'm like, this is so good. This looks exactly like the thing I experienced." It doesn't look anything like it, and she still has it, which is maybe the point: something essential was already in place, the need to integrate experience through image-making, to metabolize the world by drawing it.
Wood grew up in Albuquerque and now lives with her family in a rural mountain village on the High Road to Taos. She works primarily in painting, illustration, and paper mache sculpture, and she calls herself a play-based artist, a description that undersells the seriousness of the underlying investigation while accurately describing the method. Playfulness, for Wood, is a technology that disarms and opens access to places earnestness tends to keep locked.
The cast of characters at the center of her current work, simple, faceless, dog-like glyphs, emerged during one of the hardest periods of her life. Wood contracted Lyme disease shortly after college, and what followed was nearly a decade of serious illness, aggressive treatment, and episodic collapse. To give herself something to do during treatment, she started making a drawing every day and didn't miss one for roughly 740 of them. A cast of animal-like characters began to emerge, simple glyphs that developed into what she describes as a kind of toolbox, a way to approach narratives that were otherwise too painful to touch directly, including, as she puts it, "that of my own vulnerability and impermanence."
She's clear that the work wasn't illustration of what was happening but companionship, something that came alongside the experience rather than narrating it, an integration process running quietly beneath the surface of her days. That quality hasn't left the work as it's evolved.
Variations on a Theme, opening at Hecho a Mano on April 3rd, is an expansion of an earlier series called A Really Good Date I-IV, which explored platonic intimacy through interactions between pairs of those same dog-like figures. The new show isolates five of those pairings and asks what can develop from a single encounter, producing twenty-six new paintings in ink and gouache that Wood describes as pattern-based mutations of the original pairings, expressing the infinite potential of human connection forward from a single point of contact.
"I want to make small and intimate spaces of insight and exploration that exist outside of verbal language," Wood says, "but that feel or recall something just out of reach, a word on the tip of your tongue, or a latent memory or dream."
Looking at this work is like trying to read something in a language you don't know, and then realizing you do.