An Interview with Artist Kathryn Batsel
Every month during the First Friday Art Walk in Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe we bring in an artist or maker for a pop-up! This month we’re bringing in artist Kathryn Batsel aka @interdimensionalbakesale. We met Kathryn at the Rainbow Dome Solstice Market a few months back and knew that we wanted to interview her and have her in to the shop. Ahead of her pop-up with us, we asked her some questions about herself, her art, and sustainability. Enjoy!
When did you start making and selling art?
I started this specific project in fall of 2022, but I’ve been making and selling art for a long time! I’ve been making art my whole life; I was lucky enough to be encouraged to be creative by artists in my family like my mom and grandmother when I was a little kid. Before starting my 3D print art project, I’ve been primarily a fiber artist. The first time I sold art in a market capacity, I was making colorwork knit hats. This was around 2011 when I was 19. While historically a lot of my work has been functional (i.e. wearables like hats or sweaters), I started to focus a lot more on art for art’s sake since moving to Denver in 2015. Working with my previous art collective, Secret Love Collective, helped that a lot!
What inspires your work?
A few years ago I bought a statue from David Barnes at an Of Montreal show that was a figure of a boy and girl that had been repainted to be all one color with creepy little faces all over it. This is one of my prized possessions and has survived a few re-gluings after my cat got a little too rowdy. The idea of taking a kitschy tchotchke and reimagining it to become somewhat monstrous really stuck with me, and when I got access to 3D scanning technology through my job (I work at a public library makerspace), I started exploring different forms that this could take.
There’s something about taking a cutesy image and distorting it that really appeals to my sensibilities as a queer artist. I specifically want to explore what to me is a very queer femme aesthetic - this idea of a girliness and weirdness that exists only for itself and becomes something all its own. To me, this concept of queer femme represents a version of the feminine made strange, something that’s welcoming and familiar but somewhat monstrous in that it’s become a campy caricature of itself. My favorite tattoo artist, Char Bataille, has a lot of work that I think represents this concept well.
What does sustainability mean to you and how does your art reflect that belief?
This is an interesting question to answer for this specific project because I think a lot of what I’m doing now is kind of trying to understand mass production by making myself the mass producer. I have a kind of compulsive desire to create these where if I’m not careful I’ll find myself swimming in a room of cats (this is why I began to sell them after making too many to fit in my home), so there’s always kind of a balance I need to find within myself between how many creatures are reasonable to create and how many I desire to create, the latter being basically endless.
That being said, there’s a lot I do to reduce the footprint of this project. For example, I use a material called PLA that’s a form of plastic made out of corn. PLA is industrially compostable, and I recycle my scraps through a service that allows them to be reused. A lot of my project too is about exploring the medium of 3D printing itself, so I like to take misprints and mistakes that might be otherwise discarded by someone pursuing perfection and make them into weird collages.
The main thing I’m currently trying to work out with sustainability is what to do with the spools that the 3D print filament rolls come on! I’ve been donating the cardboard spools to the Art Garage for kids to make art out of, but I haven’t found a great use for the plastic ones. If anyone’s interested, please reach out to me! Right now I just have a bunch of rolls hanging out in my house waiting to become art.
A big part of sustainability to me means reusing whenever possible and finding a way to save things that might otherwise be discarded by breathing new life into them, both of which I try to do whenever possible.
What is your goal as an artist?
Central to all my work is the idea of cultivating a radical imagination that allows us to imagine new worlds beyond the one we live in. I think the radical imagination is so important, especially when the present feels increasingly hopeless.
In general, I’m kind of just always compelled to make art, and I think I couldn’t stop doing it if I tried. So a lot of my goals as an artist are also just to make work for myself, because I love doing it!
If you were an animal/breakfast cereal/ice cream flavor/style of architecture what would you be?
Obviously I’d be a three eyed cat!
What’s next for you? Are there any projects or goals you are currently working toward that you'd like to share about?
I’ve got a show coming up in the Storeroom in late February!! I’ve been working on a lot of larger scale figures that I’m very excited to show. Since I’ve started this project, I’ve just been doing markets, but I’ve been preparing for a larger scale installation for a while. I think it will be great to set up my creatures more in their own world!
Are there any artistic mediums you’d like to explore that you haven’t yet?
I’ve been interested for a while in exploring combining microelectronics into my art, but I’m finding there’s somewhat of a steep learning curve for me. I’ve been talking with my partner Kelsie who has much more of an engineer brain than I do about doing some collaborations, and I’m excited to see what comes from that! Other than that, I don’t have anything specific on the horizon - I’ve got some craft goals like getting better at mending, for example, but I think my next art medium will come to me when I’m ready to explore it.
Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in being one of our featured artists, send us an email. We’re always looking to expand our community and showcase the talent our city has to offer.
Until next time,
“Be excellent to each other”
