Kate Long Hodges
Kate Long Hodges grew up on an apple orchard in Cornwall Vermont. She taught art to children at orphanages in Brazil and Honduras and received her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona in sculpture. She worked for artist Judy Pfaff as an assistant in New York, helping with large-scale installations, then returned to Arizona to pursue her own artwork. She founded Little Lightning Studios, a mobile art school that serves young children and teenagers in the Tucson community. She is co-director of The Land With No Name, Sanctuary For Homeless Sculpture, a forty-five acre plot of wild desert that she and her husband Ted Wade Springer have been directing for 12 years.
Resilience Revisited
Kate's art engages themes of organic materiality, physical and emotional intimacy with the land, and co-authorship with earth systems and elements. These sculptures are created from pieces of wood rescued after the 2003 forest fires on Mt. Lemmon. These three segments are revisited pieces of Kate's 2005 Centennial Award sculptural installation, which stood by the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research as two full carved trunks, each standing around 35 feet vertically.
Marry Me Earth
These textile-adjacent pieces are created using natural materials gathered from places she has lived: Burrs from Vermont, Lichen from Alaska, Mica from Arizona, Cactus spines from the Sonoran Desert, and found objects from city streets. Through traveling to these locations, she finds an internal map immersed in the senses, expressing the visceral beauty of plant life and our place within it. The art becomes a celebration of places on earth we hold dear to us.
