Meet the Artist // Kathleen Judge
Kathleen Judge is a mixed-media artist who uses ink drawings, acrylic paint, animation, and sound to explore landscapes. Her current work draws inspiration from scrap metal yards, junkyards, and rocky terrains across the U.S. and beyond. She captures the interplay of immense forces, such as twisted metal and metamorphic rocks, with delicate, fragile elements in these environments.
Can you give us an introduction about yourself and your background?
My name is Kathleen Judge. I’m a visual artist working across different mediums such as printmaking, drawing, animation and video projection. My life in arts has run on a couple tracks at once; Commercial arts such as storyboarding and animation, illustration, print and video work while also pursuing independent projects with drawing and more recently painting and sound.
As an artist, how would you say you’ve grown since the start of your career?
I’m not sure it’s possible to create art without growth and change. Whether through ideas, concepts, also craft and skill. Time with materials and ideas are essential for that growth—or that’s the aim for me. Recognizing and respecting my intuition has probably been one of the essential tools of growth that helps me creatively. When I was younger my intuition was there but I didn’t have faith in and often disregarded, the confidence to trust my instincts and intuition has strengthened over time.
When you say you’re coming back into painting and going in and out of animation, does that have to do with your intuition as well?
Yes, I’d say that’s part of it. For example, years ago I stumbled on a closed junkyard in process of being dismantled and moved from Wyoming to another state. Everyday I went and drew the heaps of metal and debris, the engines strewn about, the stacked cars. I loved it. The machines, landscape, wind, the lines and energy of the crumpled metal and parts sticking out and stacked all over. The scraggly feral goats, dog, rabbits that follow me around the junkyard from a distance. An extremely rural environment. After that I returned to the city and shifted from drawing cityscapes and buildings to finding metal scrap yards to draw from. As the years passed I moved away from the junk and scrap yards and almost forgot about the work and experience. I don’t know how something so important to a person can drift away and be forgotten—but that has happened. Years passed and I found I’d drifted away from large-scale drawing and the junkyards and scrap metal yards.
When Covid happened, I began to look back at old sketchbooks and drawings I’d done years before. I rediscovered my original Wyoming artwork and it reminded me of the excitement and insight the landscapes of metal had revealed to me. That’s when I decided to seek out local junkyards again and to see what happens. I started spending a lot of time biking to different scrap metal yards to do on-site paintings. I’d also record the sounds I heard while painting, which were mostly gangs of motorcycles and birds. The streets had that Covid emptiness that occurred all over the world. It was at this time, I’d say, my intuition led me back to the places I’d loved but had forgotten about over the years since that first Wyoming junkyard. Originally I had worked in charcoal but now I’ve switched to ink and acrylic paint. There’s a boldness and ‘you can’t erase it’ quality and intention with ink that I really like. Returning to the junkyards and scrap metal yards and large-scale painting and drawing has recentered me to the gesture that originally captivated me back in that original Wyoming junkyard—the lines and energy of the metal and the emotional color of each particular site.
What inspires you?
Light and lines, marks. That’s one reason I love printmaking – with woodcut or scratchboard, when you’re scratching the ink off of the board, it gives you sharp lines and energy. Also why I like animation, especially abstract animation, is because it’s about motion and light.
You’ll be here for three more months – what are you planning to do?
This next segment of the residency I will keep on with the large-scale ink paintings and continue animation experiments I started, which build out from small close-up sections of the larger drawings. Light is a feature within a number of the drawings which I’ll continue to explore. I’ll expand and explore more of my Berlin field recordings and how they can integrate into the animation/video projection.