Biography
Katie Peck was born and raised in San Jose, CA and now lives and works in Baltimore, MD as an artist and educator. She received her MFA in the Mount Royal School of Art (Multidisciplinary MFA) at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her most recent work is focused on human impacts on the environment through the lens of sport fishing and Rainbow trout globalization using humor, craft, and camp to investigate our interactions with non human creatures.
Peck soft sculptures and weaving practice works to process what it means to find the beauty in nature even with signs of human impact. Drawing on collective memory through nostalgic material choices, such as carpet, woven cloths, and trash polluting natural spaces, Peck gives a voice to the places that these materials are impacting. Not only is she sourcing subject matter from her own past and present to highlight human impact on our natural world, her work engages with local scientists and activists to gain objective information to define the limitations of her reality.
In 2017 she was awarded the Summer Undergrad Research Fellowship from Chapman University where she created an 8ft crashing wave from marine pollution collected from the local beached of the University. Displayed for the International Beach Cleanup Day it received great media coverage. From there she curated an international art show, Matters of the Ocean, for the 6th International Marine Debris Conference put on by EU Environment and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association.
Artist Statement
I am a water child and a fiber human. This is a statement I have been returning to and the only description of myself that captures my inner and exterior identities. Water and fiber arts are both lenses that help me view and understand. I am a fiber artist working in an interdisciplinary way focused on my concerns for all creatures' and plant lifes future living in a quickly escalating carbon filled atmosphere. I pull imagery and storytelling through personal narratives surrounding fishing, gardening, and experiences teaching children. Using weaving, drawing, installation and puppetry I create artworks that expand time from childhood memories but place them in the present highlighting the melancholy nature of looking backwards and forwards. My current body of work utilizes and collaborates with Rainbow Trout to examine and critique human interference and manipulation of ecosystems and interspecies relationships.