Kate Brooke, artist: printmaking, drawing, mixed media, works on paper

Kate Brooke, Opossum Track Press

Please click on "Gallery" to see a selection of art work; click on "Wood Chips & Wet Ink" to see the very newest work; click on Flora & Fauna to see very large caterpillars.

Art & Language: Kate Brooke draws on elements of nature and language in her work. Feature story by Anne Pagel, 'L' Magazine, August, 2009 issue, pages 45, 47-48.

Welcome to the Opossum Track Press web site. Founded in 1990, the Opossum Track Press is a printmaking studio located in Lincoln, Nebraska. The studio houses a K-B Press for printing etchings and relief prints, a Vandercook-4 Proof Press for letterpress work, and safety exhaust cabinets for working with solvents and etching with acids.

I work on paper. Almost all of my images incorporate one or more printmaking technique: relief, intaglio, and/or letterpress. I often work with Sumi and collage to create a background, then print over that, resulting in one-of-a-kind work instead of editioned prints. Occasionally, I create more traditional images that can be editioned, though invariably my editions are small (twenty or fewer) because of the layering of different kinds of techniques.

Most of the work represented on this web site is drawn from two ongoing, overlapping bodies of work called Sappho images and Field Guides.

Sappho images: I pair fragments of poetry by Sappho, the first poet, with sumi ink washes, relief and letterpress printmaking. Viewers familiar with my work may recognize the small animal figures and the occasional lizard. New to my images are renderings of insects which have crept into my prints. Almost all of the insect images have as their sources live bugs which I photographed and released (usually outside). Most of the translations of Sappho's poetry are by Mary Barnard, with a few also by Ann Carson.

Field Guides: birds and other imagery from nature figure prominently in these images, which also incorporate texts from letters and other writings, often by people close to me. In Field Guides I combine representations from nature with texts which address some of our human ways of understanding nature. My sources range from natural history guide books to personal letters to dissertations on subjects like stress management in poultry. I rely on these for information, inspiration, and connections to my own observations of that natural world.

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