“It’s so blue. Can’t you do anything else?” Somebody said that to Katharine T. Jacobs at a market. Paulette and I have notes.
Katharine lays pressed wildflowers, feathers, and dried apple slices on paper coated in light-sensitive chemistry, then lets the sun do the rest. She only prints while the sun’s out. We talked about how she knows a print is done, going from large-format nudes to botanicals, the birthday sale that built her collectors, and why cyanotype keeps getting called a “woman’s” medium like that’s an insult.
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Collect the work
Wild & Soft is at Blue Bee Cider in Richmond through October 31. 18 × 24 originals are $1,600, 22 × 30 originals are $3,000, and reproduction prints are $90. Payment plans available, and you can try a piece in your space first.
Flip through the Collector’s Catalog
Find Katharine
@katharinetjacobs on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Substack, and Patreon.
Chapters
00:00 Cold open and intro
01:13 Welcome to [Untitled]
03:10 From large-format nudes to botanical cyanotypes
09:28 Printing only with the sun
11:24 Four red valerian
15:26 How do you know a piece is done?
16:06 Being a novice again: clay, risk, and the body
29:01 Small moments of safety, bigger risks
33:27 What it feels like to be collected
36:44 The June 17 birthday sale
38:25 “It’s so blue”
44:15 Keeping craft alive, and Blue Bee’s cyanotype blue
47:11 Why “Wild & Soft”
49:19 1842, Anna Atkins, and women’s work
52:10 “When you make things elite, the portal is closed”
56:31 Classes and bouquet cyanotypes
57:46 Reveal: all her work in one room
59:19 What cronehood means to Katharine
1:03:55 Where to find Katharine
1:05:00 Outro
Transcript
Lightly edited for reading: filler words, false starts, and crosstalk are removed. Sounds and music are described in [brackets].
Intro
[Theme music plays under the intro.]
Sylvia: We're going to talk about what beauty in art means, and why folks shit on cyanotypes as a “woman's” medium, like so much of the crafts.
It's me again! Sylvia, owner and gallerist at The Crone House. I'm calling in all of the women who collect art, because we're doing something special here: we may be sweaty, and we're getting loud about the women who make art! My co-host and resident artist Paulette Beete and I chat with women who make art, collect art, run galleries, curate exhibitions, and other experts in what it means to be an art collector in the matriarchy. We're also all mostly over forty and neurodivergent, so sometimes it's a bit like herding perimenopausal cats.
On this episode, we're talking with Northern California artist Katharine T. Jacobs, whose botanical cyanotype collection, Wild and Soft, is on view at Blue Bee Cider, which just extended to October 31st. What can I say? I'm never ready to let go of summer. I am a Cancer. Katharine talks about how making cyanotypes during the summer became a ritual for softness and beauty, finding peace in the sunshine and wildflowers.
[Music swells, then fades into the conversation.]
The Conversation
Sylvia: Hi. Welcome. This is our podcast called—what's the title of our podcast? My brain is so ADHD right now. It's ridiculous. It's called Untitled.
Paulette: The name of our podcast is Untitled the Podcast.
Sylvia: Untitled. That's what our podcast is. Because we are such brain-foggy, ADHD, and perimenopausal creatives that we couldn't come up with a name that we wanted—we had so many different names we wanted to use that this is what we came up with for now.
So, just to do a quick introduction, this is Katharine, Katharine Jacobs. She's an artist from Northern California, and she is doing our solo show at Blue Bee Cider, showing off her beautiful cyanotypes. Welcome to the show.
Katharine: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Sylvia: Oh, I was going to say, we are so thrilled to have you as part of our season, and your beautiful botanicals that you show in this work, and we're really excited to talk to you today. Paulette, what were we talking about before that we wanted to bring up?
Paulette: Well, when we were setting up, Katharine, we were talking about your website and how if you scroll down, you'll see some of the artistic nudes you did early in your career, and you started to tell us about how you made the switch into working with cyanotypes. So let's start there, to talk about that part of your practice and how it evolved.
Katharine: Yeah. So I used to live in Portland, Oregon, and I had a really close friend and mentor, Ray Bidegain. And even prior to that, I went to a small craft school in Oregon. There I studied photography, and that's where I learned a lot of alternative process stuff. But I was always—even in high school—I couldn't wait to try and take photographs of my friends, and I was always interested in the nude and the female form. So early on in college, that's what I started to focus on.
And I did that for years and years, and used to kind of take myself probably a little too seriously. Photography is hard. Because you're photographing things that already kind of exist, you have to convince yourself that it's meaningful—and I'm not saying it isn't, and a lot of the work that I made was. But it could be a drag sometimes. So I did that for over a decade.
And it really wasn't until I left Oregon and kind of left my community there. I had my friend Ray, and Ray always had people coming to study with him. He did platinum, palladium, and he's kind of the know-all of all process photography and large format photography. So I fell pretty heavy into the large format nude. It's not just that I was doing digital nudes. There's a level of elitism, a little bit—it's film and it's large format, so it's special, you know. But it does slow you down, and it is a very different process of working. Ray shoots with eight by ten, I shot with four by five, and we would hire models together, and we taught a lot of portrait classes. And I taught darkroom for a long time, and I was totally thinking that's what I would do forever.
And then when I went to grad school, it was kind of a whole sea change of my life. I got divorced, I was a newly single mom, newly diagnosed with MS, and I think I just needed to shed that way of making too. And then it was also the pandemic, so I wasn't really able to work with models in the same way. And I had left my community. The ease of it was gone, and it started to feel really clunky and purposeless.
So that's when I really started to embrace botanicals, because it was like, I want to make something. I'm surrounded by wildflowers here in rural California—I know a way. And I have made a lot of cyanotypes with my film negatives too, because they were four by five, so you're really limited in the size. That's where I feel like photography can be limiting. You're limited to a format, you're limited to documenting something that exists.
So even though I'm still limited with cyanotype—and maybe even scaling back that much more—I'm not really having to feel like these are conceptual. I just get to make them because they're beautiful, which in fine art you don't always get that luxury. Sometimes beauty is dismissed. It's not enough to just make something beautiful. And I think that beauty is a really important component in some of the other, more conceptual or harder stuff I make.
So cyanotype became this really good practice in just embracing the beauty, witnessing the beauty, making something out of something that already exists. So it's been a total evolution. Those nudes still feel very much authentic to me and where I came from, but it also feels almost like a past life. It's interesting what each decade brings as an artist. I totally shifted.
Sylvia: It's really interesting that you talk about allowing art to just be beautiful and letting your environment really inspire and capture. One of the things you and I talked about quite a bit while we were thinking about the solo show is the seasons of life, and when we are resting and when we are active. Usually summer is a time where we're in full bloom and active, and wintertime is where we're more internal and resting. But this type of joyful sun play that you do with these botanicals and cyanotype is restful for you. It's an opportunity for you to put down the heavier sculpture work.
Oh, yes, by the way, she is a sculptor—does amazing things with clay and ceramic work. We have one of her sculptures in our collection. If you want to buy it, go check it out.
And that has a lot to do with your body and its relationship to the things that you've experienced, and putting that down to be able to pick up something a little softer, like the cyanotypes and botanicals. So how do you—what's that transition, now that it's become more of an annual ritual for you?
Katharine: Yeah, well, when I first started printing cyanotype, I had done it in college, so I'd learned it. It's one of the first things you learn if you're ever in an alternative process program. At the college I went to, the teacher was very much interested in alternative processes, and film is a very darkroom-heavy class. So it's one of the first things you use. It's always blue—you can kind of tone it, but everyone has the same sort of resistance to it.
But I remember talking to my friend Heidi, Heidi Kilpatrick. She is a cyanotype printer as well, but she makes these ephemeral kind of memory capsules. And I was asking her, how are you going to print? She's up in Portland, so we have way less sun there. I was like, well, how do you print in the winter? And she says, I don't. I only do it with the sun.
And that was around the same time that I was transitioning out of Portland, and I was coming to California and dealing with this new diagnosis of a chronic illness. And I have always heard her voice in my head—that she just allows herself to rest and not force something that can't be done. Why do we have to do it artificially? Why do I have to build a light box so I can do it nonstop? That sort of corporate, toxic, I don't know, churn, churn, churn factory mindset. And I've just taken that with me.
So I've definitely gotten my setup easier and easier to do, and I have made cyanotypes in response to things that are happening in the world, but I have just gotten so much more inspired by the botanicals where I live. I live in the Sierra Nevadas, and it's that kind of rebirth that I feel every spring. As soon as we're starting to get the longer days, the wildflowers start to pop up, and I feel myself just motivated after a long winter where maybe it's hard to get in the studio and it's hard to do all those things. So I find it is this creative burst that kickstarts everything.
So I guess that's why I kind of talk about them like they're this exercise in beauty. I don't want to say mindless, but I don't have the pressure of, I'm going to take this, I'm going to do this, and it's going to mean this, and it's going to conceptually be like this, and it's going to take this to build it, and then I'm going to print it. It's like, I like these flowers. I got four of them. I'm going to print with them.
I printed with four red valerian, and my YouTube—a lot of people were like, never do four, it has to be an odd number. I was like, literally there were four flowers. That was my why.
And I think part of it is because cyanotype is kind of dismissed as feminine and easy. So it has this really great entry point, which I think is why I've had so much success sharing my videos on social media, because I can show this start to finish. I can make it while being recorded and not feel pressure. If I'm building a sculpture and I'm trying to record myself, it adds this other pressure—I'm going to mess it up because they're watching me, even though I'm just recording myself. But cyanotype, I can do with a level of ease.
And I had had a couple really hard years, and I think I needed to adopt something that was easy and joyful. I started doing them when my daughter was just a baby, and now she's nine, and we're going to drop stuff off at the county fair tomorrow. And she was like, I think I'm gonna make a print. And she pretty much made the print all by herself today—all I did was pick up the glass for her. And just watching that evolve, and both of our confidence. So it's been a really healthy part of my practice.
If I had been in grad school and been like, I'm only making cyanotypes, I think no one would have really—that's where art gets clunky and hard. You're either in this upper echelon of it has to be high art, or you are in grad school, and so everything you do, you're like, it has to be important, it has to be the most meaningful thing. So it was really a response to grad school: I don't have to make everything. And I've had a lot of freedom with that.
And I think it's helped me with my sculptural work. The viewer doesn't have to know everything. You don't have to know that eight years ago I started using cyanotype because I was diagnosed with MS, and a doctor told me that in the Pacific Northwest women have MS because they have a lack of vitamin D, and that prompted me to reintegrate cyanotype. You don't have to know all that, but because I make it with my body, because I make it with my surroundings, it's about me. And it's been really nice to have the simplicity resonate with everyone, and it doesn't have to feel like this intangible, elite art, capital A-R, as my friend Katie Gong says.
Paulette: Oh, I love that idea of switching the focus of your practice, giving you freedom away from the hard and fast rules. Because I was a poet for many, many years, and this visual art is very new to me, but because of that, I feel that same freedom I had as a beginner, where I didn't really think about, oh, it's got to look like this and be like this. I just wanted to really explore, and it's fun. I might have ordered a hundred bucks' worth of art supplies today. Allegedly. That is something that happened.
The reason I brought up poetry—because it seems like making a cyanotype is kind of like writing a poem, that I imagine you could tinker with it forever. And so I'm wondering how you know your piece is done. And I also realized I totally cut you off. So if you could remember what you were going to say, please say that first.
Katharine: Well, what you were saying—like, okay, I'm an expert. I used to feel that way. I was like, what is it, ten thousand hours makes you an expert or something? And so I was like, well, I've been doing darkroom photography for fifteen years, in the darkroom every day, have a darkroom in my home. I'm probably technically an expert. There's still things you don't feel confident in, even if you're an expert.
But I found myself really craving—and I think this is what, you know—there's something really powerful about being a novice. And that's where clay has really become this—I know, and maybe clay people would argue with this, but my experience with a lot of clay people is there's sort of this—it's always a test, you know? Everyone knows the risk involved, right? And I really needed that, because that was not permitted in photography. It was like, if it didn't work, it's your fault and you should have known better. And there was clear signs to get you there, where with ceramics, it's like shit happens kind of thing, you know?
Sylvia: Yeah. There's a healthy sense of detachment. Truer words were never—yeah. Well, that's one of the reasons why I got into doing that as well. It was because of that detachment, and needing to—with my writing—that saying, being able to kill your darlings. I was too precious with things. So ceramics, in that process, you can have all the experience and the knowledge and the science behind it, but at the end of the day, whatever's coming out of the kiln is so specific to that kiln firing, and it's just what's going to happen.
Katharine: Yes. Right. And this kind of circles back to your last question, Paulette. It was like, how do I know when the piece is done? But I work extremely intuitively, and I think that's what really works for me with cyanotype. And I'm getting this question all the time. Like, how long do you know to leave it in the sun? How long do you know? And I know there's a way to totally geek out and find the UV index of the day and know that when it's UV eight, it's this many minutes. I can literally be—and not to toot my own horn, because I will make a second print if it's not good, I mess up all the time—but I can look and say sixteen minutes, or eleven minutes, or forty-five minutes in the spring, you know? There's something about that that I have always wanted to lean into.
And intuition was something I lost when I was in an abusive marriage. And that all has been this thing that I'm reestablishing within myself. And if you watch my process videos—I started to record myself making them this year—I can watch myself see when I'm done. I can't fully explain it to you, but I can see it on my face, and I'm like, yeah, there it is, you know? So I will move things around until I'm satisfied.
And there's not a lot of darlings even to kill, you know? It's one piece of watercolor paper. It's probably fifty cents, if even, of chemistry. I can do it again. I have four hours of really good printing time. I could really work on it if I want to, or I can move on to a ceramic piece or something else. And allowing myself to know that it's just not my day—that just wasn't meant to happen for me today, you know?—that has helped me be in my studio almost every day. That has helped build my creativity so much, because I think we can really restrict ourselves. If I don't know what I'm going to make, then I get that freeze anxiety, you know? So I'll procrastinate or I'll freeze. And so it's helped me work through that.
But there's no one way for me to know. And it's funny when I get responses like that, like, oh, you shouldn't have done for. It's like, I don't really play into the rules of composition outside of what I visually think looks good. I think I have a very trained eye for composition, having been a large format photographer for over a decade. You compose on your little grid. I kind of look at the world like that.
Paulette: I was going to say, I was going to throw out another artist metaphor. As you're talking, it's making me think about really good actors, when they talk about how they get the memorization and the blocking—they get that in their bodies. And then it's just, from there, intuition. And I feel like that's the same thing.
When people talk about working intuitively, I think it can sound like, well, I'm just doing whatever, I'm just pulling it from the air. But I don't think that's it at all. I think if you work that way, it just means you've embodied the quote-unquote rules enough that you've developed your own sense of what works. And so you're just tapping in, in a deeper, less fearful way, to that training—a way that's past the checkbox of what does my foreground look like and what does my background look like, because you just have that already. You know already that you've got to find those things. So I think it's a really beautiful, freeing way of working. And it allows you to make those mistakes, so to speak, that are actually your evolution into the next phase of your practice, or leveling up.
Katharine: Oh, I was just going to say, I think musicians call that flow state. We don't talk about flow state in visual art, but watching myself on video, I'm like, oh, you're doing something.
Sylvia: What does it feel like? I mean, I know you said you can see it on your face, but when you're in that moment and you're experiencing that flow—you just look like you're having fun, honestly.
Katharine: I think so. I mean, I think cyanotype is a bit more somatic than—I mean, four-by-five is a physical process. But there's something about being able to actually pick up a physical object and move it. Like a model—you can't discard a model the way I can toss away a flower, you know? So there's something very tactile about it. Obviously, that is different, not just because it's not human, but—
That's why I started doing ceramic. I just felt like I needed to be using my body in my work. And when you're a photographer—I mean, the main response I was getting was, oh, well, just—you know, I was making work mostly about multiple sclerosis. And so the fellow students I had in my master's program were like, well, just take your camera with you to the doctor. And I can't think of anything less healing than doing that, you know? Like, yeah, sure, when I'm already emotionally having to support myself to go through and get a medical treatment, I definitely want to be working, you know?
Art is labor. I was thinking that when I made a note about that, when Paulette was talking—sometimes I'm just tired. I have fatigue. I have creativity fatigue, even if it's my poetry, it's my practice, this is my medium. I need other mediums to support me emotionally. And so that's how cyanotype feels for me.
And that's where I went into clay. And I remember my ceramic professor—I was like, well, I'm trying to make all this work about my body and my illness and my trauma. And he's like, you know, everything you make with clay is already about you, because you made it with your body. Your hands, your fingerprints are in it. And the way that that transformed me in making—I think that was the gateway for me. So the cyanotypes definitely have my touch in there, you know, and then the ceramic work is all about that.
And it has made it so I've been able to release the grip I needed on how is this going to be perceived? How is this going to be accepted in the world? How is the viewer going to digest this? And once I was able to let go of that, my work has resonated with so many more people and been so much more fun to make.
Sylvia: Intuition is a big part of the house—using our intuition as part of womanhood. We are cyclical. That comes from a lot of intuition. As I talk with art collectors: where do you feel it in your body when you see it, when you see a piece that really resonates with you? What is that intuitive feeling for you that hits you?
So how do you feel like your intuition has grown, going from a space where it was completely oppressed and suppressed, and now into this state of really—it's almost divine. Divine feminine and intuition is what I feel comes into these pieces of yours. How has that grown and changed?
Katharine: Yeah, well, I thought about that when Paulette was talking about intuition and how some people can kind of dismiss it almost, right? Like it's not enough. Like, oh, you're just going off your intuition, so you don't have a concept, so you don't have a meaning, there's nothing more here. But I think if you've never lost that intuitive ability, you don't realize how much of a survival technique it is. And I think it can get really taken for granted.
So in my abusive relationship, I had just been gaslighted to dust. And so for years, almost a decade, every time I'd be like, that doesn't feel right, I was just told I was completely wrong and controlling and stupid and all of these things. And so coming back and intentionally recognizing that—first of all, you're like, I was right all along. That's crazy. But once you realize you were right all along, then I started to really be like, I need to value that part of me. That intuitive part of me was so strong. And the fact that it was so dead on, and that it also could be so dismantled by another person, made me be like, I need to exercise this every day. And I have just allowed myself to do that.
So I think I definitely find my art practice has become that exercise. And especially—I'm seeing it now as we're talking—it totally is part of the cyanotype work, because I'm not planning these out. I do the background, and then the day, I'll be like, mm, this is a rectangle. This is an oval. There's only so many limits, and it is two-dimensional, but even those little elements of intuition, and being able to just be like, oh, never mind, it's a square—that's a huge thing for me. Those were small steps in my recovery and healing.
I mean, it's helped me a lot mental health-wise. And also my physical health, I feel like, is better for a long time. With MS, my first attack, you kind of lose faith in your body. You're like, what the hell is that? And you can just do that when you feel like it? And this is just going to maybe happen to me again. And it took me years to convince myself that I was safe again, even just in my own body. I'm doing all the right things. I'm medicated. I'm doing what I can. Of course, all bodies can crap out at you at any time.
So it was all that—it was emotional, it was my traumas, survival tactics. But it was also just like, I felt like I couldn't even trust my own body. And the more that I have worked on my intuition, it's helped me in so many ways, both with my physical and mental health. So I'm not sure if that totally answered that, though.
Sylvia: Oh my gosh. Yeah. What really struck me was that it was repetitive, small moments of safety in which to explore your intuition. And that repetition of it is what has developed it more and then brought healing to your life. It's something that they say with folks with PTSD—you have to experience more safety, experiencing life in safety, as a means of healing. And you did that naturally with your work and cyanotypes, just by needing to be in the sun and needing to be able to still make something while you were going through this transition and a baby on your hip. You intuitively created that opportunity for yourself. And that's really cool.
Katharine: Yeah. Makes me think of when those small moments of safety—they allow you to take bigger risks. And I think that's where I can really see that with my physical health. I was afraid to walk or overexert myself. And over these years, I've really—pain is a weird thing. Chronic pain is strange, but they don't really research it very much. But pain—you can either live in pain and become more and more immobile, or you can do what you can in the pain that you're in.
And that was sort of something I had to—and I guess I could go emotional. And that's coming from a—I'm a pretty able-bodied person. I have a disability, but I am not immobile or things like that. But it was hard for me to even feel safe moving my body on a small scale.
So the cyanotypes are really physical, with my big sheet of glass. And they also have a short—the whole process takes half an hour for each print, so I can say I'm done after one. There's a lot of permission and freedom in that, to give myself the grace to know when to stop. So that just made me think of that when you said little exercises help build the intuition and also help me take bigger risks. Because with the sculptures, I definitely feel like I take a much bigger risk.
And I thought for sure, I'm just going to make these weird things and people might hate them, but I just felt compelled to do it. And because I had been exercising that for a couple of years before, last year I had a solo show in June of all my sculptures, figures, and I've almost sold them all. They were almost all in homes with collectors. I have to make a new batch. I have a few. But just to be like, oh, wait, people are resonating with it because you gave yourself permission to take the risk. And now the cyanotypes are kind of doing the same thing.
Sylvia: Well, I love that you brought up—go ahead, Paulette.
Paulette: I really love the words that keep coming up in this conversation: permission, safety, freedom, but yet also risk. And I love how those are all working together, and that we're having a conversation about making art. I mean, right, it's so different from what we learned when we go to our MFA programs—the rules, and the person that's like, oh, but you can't have an even number displayed, although of course you can if it's the right items, right? And I'm just kind of verklempt right now because this is amazing. Okay, Sylvia, you may carry on with your question.
Sylvia: Well, we were just talking about your collectors and your work finding itself into more people's homes. How does that—what's that feel like? I'm trying to think of a way to phrase this.
Paulette: Let's just go with: how does it feel to be collected? Like, what is that, right? Someone has been like, yes, I want this thing. It speaks to me. It's precious to me. I need it.
Sylvia: And I want to pay you lots of money for it.
Katharine: Right? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. The last show I was in, in LA, people were like, these are really reasonably priced. I'm like, I don't know if that's the response that I'm going for, but good to know. Kind of makes you be like, I'll kick it up a notch, I guess. But yes, absolutely. But without collectors, you don't know your value or your worth.
And I think the first—I worked at a coffee shop. I had just been taking portraits of strangers and my friends with my four-by-five. I was using Polaroid Type 55. I was probably twenty, working in a coffee shop, and my friend was like, put your pictures up. So I put up a bunch of my pictures, and one of the regulars was like, I really want to buy one of these. I think I sold it for fifty bucks. And I was like, that's crazy. People want to buy my pictures.
And over the years, I went on a date with a guy, and he was like, I really like that. Can I buy that from you? Sold him something for four hundred dollars. And it was just weird, because you're like—I mean, we only went on one date, but he still wanted my art. So it validates you in a way where you can keep going.
And obviously we live under capitalism, and that is reality. And you're told so much as an artist—why would you be an artist? You can't make money. And I have believed that deeply at times. I have waited tables. I have taught darkroom classes at night. I have believed that deeply, that I could not do it by myself, or that I needed to be a different type of artist.
And it's been really interesting that in these last three years, I've been the most authentic version of myself. I've made the most bizarre things and the most sort of simple thing. I'm kind of on these two spectrums of myself. And I remember my friend Ursula, one time when I was making really serious portraits—she's Ursula Barton, she's a muralist, she's an artist, shout-out Ursula—she was like, you're so funny, I don't know why your work has to be so serious. And that's another thing I've kind of kept in my pocket: you can be funny. Because art can be so serious.
So in this last really three or four years, I've just said, I'm done with grad school, fuck it. I'm going to make what I want to make. Grad school really sucks something out of you and spits something out of you. And it was just like, I'm going to make what I'm going to make. And I think I know what is best, because at the time I went to grad school, I'd sold several pieces and I had been doing my birthday sale for a few years.
My friend Ray Bidegain started the birthday sale. I think I was turning thirty, and he was like, you should try your birthday sale. He has a huge—yeah. So it's in June. But it's a great segue for collectors, because that is a huge way for people to even find me in the first place. Every June seventeenth is my birthday. Every year since I was thirty, I've done a birthday sale. This year I just turned thirty-nine, and Ray was the one who prompted it.
Ray will sell his platinum-palladium prints, and now he's moved over to photogravures and printmaking. But he encouraged me to do it, and I think for my very first sale, he sent my work out on his mailing list. So a bunch of his collectors kind of came in and bought from me. And I still have people—there's at least three people every year who buy something from me from that original sale.
So being able to say that with confidence—I have collectors. Because to me, for a long time, it was like, just because you sell one, that doesn't mean you have a collector. But to watch people come back year after year and buy things, where you're like, you don't have room for that. How could you? I know you have seven or eight pieces of mine. How do you have room for more? But it's real.
Sylvia: Well, we've had many conversations about this, Katharine. Tell us what that is, for those who don't know.
Paulette: You can always make the room.
Sylvia: You can always make more room. Yeah, you can always make more room for more Katharine art.
Katharine: It's right. You have to shush that, right? You can always make more room. It's funny, because I was doing markets for a little while the last couple of years, and people would walk by my booth and they'd be like, "Oh, it's so blue. Can't you do anything else?" Sort of thing. But if you know what you're talking about, you're wrong. So I started making the inverse options and stuff, and kind of opening that door to people. But if you're a photo geek, you know what you're looking at, and so cyanotypes are an entry—an interesting gateway that way.
But those collectors started collecting me with the nudes. So sometimes they'll still buy a nude, or I have one guy every year, he's like, "Are you still selling these?" And I'm like—"Are you making more pictures?" And I kind of have to be like, no. I haven't had the urge to take a portrait in a very long time. And I still feel very satiated by my practice.
But this last birthday sale, I had a video go a little bit viral on TikTok the day before, so the momentum felt really big. So I had a really good sale this year. I've pretty much had at least one sale every day, so it makes you feel good. I remember a friend was like, "I don't know if your birthday sale is cheapening your worth," you know? Because for a long time I was selling originals. I was selling silver gelatin darkroom prints for thirty dollars. I did not know my worth for a long time. And that was also just what I had. I didn't have a printer, so it felt a lot easier for me to make with the tools I have.
I actually just went live today on YouTube, and I was like, I'm using my paper cutter, which I got from an old darkroom that closed, and it's only fifteen inches, but my prints are eighteen inches, and I'm using a yardstick. But I'm used to working with the tools that I have. I'm like, wow, I should probably get a bigger—you don't think about it till you feel the eyes on you or whatever. But yeah, I should probably get a paper cutter that is actually the appropriate dimensions. But I have this collection of these old darkroom things that I've used and loved for a long time.
But so yeah, it feels amazing to be collected, because it just makes you feel like it's not all for nothing. Like I said, artists work. Art is labor, art is hard work. I had a friend from grad school, Natalia—she saw the photos of my solo show, the Swimming Without Limbs show, the sculptures. And she was just like, "I need to buy those." And I literally thought she was joking, and she bought three. So she's not joking. People aren't joking. People want to see this stuff.
And going back to that, I just gave myself the permission to take the risk and have the flop, you know, and the favor has been returned to me repeatedly, and not just monetarily. There's something about—I can visualize where that is in someone's home. I love seeing when people tag me and see what they've done, or how they frame it. It's special. And I do treat my work that way.
I've always had a craft capital C, you know—that's the schooling I had. You make your work with the intent that it is archival and that it lasts, that it has a longevity. You don't just make something crappy and quick with hot glue—not that hot glue is crappy, I love hot glue. But I have this deeply—
Sylvia: Nuh-uh. We have a shrine to the goddess Jo-Ann. Oh, may she rest in peace. We light a candle to our goddess, Jo-Ann.
Katharine: —ingrained in me. Yes, I know. Gosh, I miss her, right? And I love folk art. I can't say that I'm a folk artist because I have a master's degree or whatever, you know, but that is the work I am drawn to, because you can see the intuition. There's a freedom in that novice that we were talking about. It's like, I didn't know the right way to do it, but I needed to make it. And that's a way that I've felt forever.
But then I have this craft, "we make things to last centuries" concept from going to grad school. And I see that dying. I went to two different craft schools for undergrad, and they both closed. And the fact that people want to watch me make something with an almost two-hundred-year-old process that was made really famous by a woman, you know—it's sort of pooh-poohed in the higher art—but because people are like, "This is so cool, I've never seen this," I feel this responsibility.
Whether you're a collector, or you're a collector in the sense that you are following me—you are participating with me, and that is also a form of collection, I feel like. And you want to interact with me, and you want to check in and see what I'm going to make next. Because "collector," I can see that being, again, an art-capital-A, high art thing. Like, I'm waiting for my fifty-thousand-dollar collector, you know? But every person who watches and participates is a collector in a way. And yeah, I just feel this responsibility to keep craft alive. And that's—I don't know. That's my why, I guess.
Sylvia: One of the things that I love about your cyanotype works is with our vineyard partner for the show, Blue Bee Cider—their brand color is cyanotype blue. It is, insanely. And then they just moved into this new space on the north side, and this entire lounge area—the walls are painted that cyanotype blue. And so having that, it's like Katharine and blue were meant to be.
Katharine: Yes, I love it. It's been really fun this year.
Sylvia: I was gonna say, Katharine made this beautiful print of apple slices that also went viral, right after your big birthday sale.
Katharine: I've noticed some orders coming in are more Virginia orders. Because we had talked about that several months ago, you were like, "Do you think you have a base?" And I was like, "I don't know, there's a few, but I could see it growing." And that was so cool when you were like, "Did you see that video? Got a million views." And I'm happy to collab and to do that for Blue Bee Cider.
For so many years it was like I had 2,000 followers. Nothing to scoff at—they are dear—but you post and it doesn't generate. You're like, who even saw it? I don't even know if anyone saw it. So to see people witnessing what we're doing, and then also to have you over there doing the work that allows me to keep making. For me to take my work into places and to sell myself, that was always really hard for me to do. I think you touched on that, obviously, in many ways—that I've undersold myself, and it took a while for me to convince myself that I was worth selling.
And I think that's the whole thing about the cyanotypes: they aren't really precious to me. They're precious because they're archival and they're made well—that form of preciousness is just ingrained in how I make work. That might be my battery. But it was interesting going through them, and I was like, oh, I could give her this, I could give her this. And then there were only really three where I was like, for some reason I feel like this one's not ready to go. But I'm just excited. Some artists can be very like, "We need to hang it with a laser and it needs to be in this kind of frame."
Sylvia: I know, right?
Katharine: She's like, girl, do what you want. Well, once they leave my hands, they're yours. I'm not like that.
Sylvia: And then let's talk about the title of the show, Wild and Soft. How did that come about? You said when we first were talking that your first show that you did with cyanotypes, you leaned into wild. But now we've got this Wild and Soft—and not Soft and Wild. How did that come around as you were thinking about the concept for the show?
Katharine: It's exciting. I mean, you helped me really brainstorm. The first solo show of cyanotypes I had out here, I just called Wild, and made that text with the flowers. It was sort of my first time really leaning into, okay, this is a solo body of work. And I framed them all and kind of catered the show to that. And so you and I were talking about, what's the reason? What's my why? It's not until somebody sort of forces you to unpack those things that you're often like, yeah, what are these about?
And I know this just from my experiences in photography: I think cyanotype gets this bottom-of-the-barrel thing. Like, well, it's not eight-by-ten platinum palladium printing. It's two-dimensional. You made it with flowers and a kindergartener could do it. I get comments like that all the time. "Oh, I did this in kindergarten." Or, "Oh, a baby could do this." But we know that is a ridiculous comment in abstract art and everything else.
But I also talk about women's work and femininity in my work a lot. And I think that's what I'm drawn to with a lot of textiles—I do embroidery and stitching—and I really find value in the labor of that work, which is not valued in the same way as a Pollock or something. And cyanotype was developed in 1842 by John Herschel, but then it was really made famous and sort of immortalized by Anna Atkins. He wasn't using it as an art form. He was using it to make copies of diagrams or reproduce maps and things like that. She took it and made these botanical prints of algae. Maybe she wasn't trying to do that in the same sort of beauty-sublime that I'm functioning in, and she was also using it in a documentary way. But I feel like I'm really honoring the originality of this type of work. And going back to that whole craft—
Sylvia: Oh, yeah. You're in an ADHD group, girl. We lose track all the time. And welcome to perimenopause. There's no trains, no cabooses going by.
Katharine: I lost my track. I forgot what we were talking—where are we? I know, right?
Paulette: Well, what that made me think about, though, is this idea of "it's so simple, even a kindergartener could do it." Well, first of all, how amazing that a young person could engage with art in that way. But what's complex about it, when a trained artist like yourself is doing it, is that it is all these things. It is documentary in a way, because this is what's growing right now. This is what's in season. This is what in 2026 is happening on our earth. But it's also a place of reverence for beauty. And it's also science. There's just such a beautiful complexity to it.
And then also so-called women's work, but it's the work of the body, which is the work of intuition. I don't know, it just feels so complex and connected and beautiful, and it doesn't feel simple. It really doesn't. It feels like there's so much more going on. And that kind of elevation of the everyday—but it's the everyday that makes life. There's something about when you were talking about the apple slices. I just thought that was so powerful. Sustenance, life, the way that apples are actually bread. It's completely blowing my mind. It's a portal. I think that's the word I'm looking for. It's not simple. It is a portal to so much.
Katharine: I love children's art. Oh, I love that. And because it's simple, the portal is open. When you make things elite, the portal is closed. When you make things hard and you ride on the carriage of "it took this much money, this much time, this much expertise to make," that portal is closed. But I feel very much like this portal is wide open for anyone. Come on. The more people that come and see, the more craft, the more making, the more tactile, the more everything.
But that makes me think of the apples too, because the response to the apples has been fascinating. Right when I printed that, I was like, oh, it looks like my MRIs. It looks like my brain scans. And it was very much the very first—because I was like, oh, they're kind of wet, I don't know. And I'm kind of talking while I'm doing that in that video, like, I don't know if it's gonna work. And there is that freedom. Like, I don't know, we'll see, we're here. And then as soon as it was finished, I was like, wow, that actually turned out awesome. And it looks just like my MRIs.
I have to get an MRI every year. I get one on Saturday this weekend for my MS, just to make sure that everything is okay. And MRIs—maybe they don't bother some people, but it's the only time in my life I have to take a beta blocker. I take a Xanax just because. So it was interesting to be like, how did an apple become an MRI? And then there's a bunch of people saying it looks like a butt. And I'm like, I like butts too. I like MRIs, I like butts, I like brain scans, I like pelvises.
So that's why the cyanotypes are interesting, because all the photographs I take and all the sculptures I make are figurative. So the cyanotypes are the one thing that really aren't figurative, but they are alive. And I loved what you said about, this is what's growing right now in the world at this time. It is documentation. And I've tried to incorporate that more. I have a friend—she's a great plant identifier, and she's always like, "That's not that, that's that." She's always filling me in, or I'll send her a picture and she's like, "That's feverfew, not chamomile, not a daisy." I'm like, thank you. So there are people whose brains work that way, and they have access also.
So yeah, I just love that it's a portal because of the simplicity, and because I have intentionally opened the portal. I don't want to make it elite. I want everyone to learn. And that's where that preciousness is like—this is something girls have been doing since 1842. I mean, boys can play too, of course, but there's just something really magical about it for me, that it is so innately and unapologetically feminine.
Sylvia: Yeah, go into that more—the conversation about that in the comments has been amazing. The more the merrier. And that's something unique to crafts, too.
Katharine: Aren't a lot of things historically that get to be that.
Paulette: And that idea of art as a form of abundance rather than art as scarcity. And you said it much better than I did when I was talking about kids making cyanotypes. But that idea that there is no barrier to entry—which is a completely different conversation from talent and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which we also value. But there's something about that abundance. If you have a body of some sort, you can make this work. That's powerful and incredible, I think.
Sylvia: And I would be remiss not to mention that Katharine also has these really great online classes on how to do them. And she also offers, for anybody who has a bouquet in their life for special reasons, where she'll preserve your bouquets as a cyanotype, which I just think is such a wonderful service. Oh, I just get chills thinking about it. I mean, when you do your next cyanotype show, it's just portals—just call it Portals. Open portals. It's portals—intuition and portals.
Paulette: That is so cool.
Katharine: I love that. Okay. Portals is next. And even my sculptures lately have these bellies that are open, and I'm like, oh, we could go full portal.
Sylvia: Would love to see how those—yeah, I know right now they're very separate practices. But I'm very curious, because they do inform each other—maybe not in how they influence the work, but when it comes to an art exhibition of maybe the breadth of your work, what that might look like in the future.
Paulette: Hold on, I'm giving you the five-minute warning. Five-minute warning, people.
Sylvia: Thank you. I've got one more question after you answer that.
Katharine: Okay, awesome. This last show I was in, Reveal, curated by [CURATOR NAME] at [GALLERY NAME], was in LA, and she incorporated seven of my sculptures and both a—one of my photographs, hand cyanotypes, as well as a botanical cyanotype. And I was like, oh, wow, this is the first time all my work has been in one room. It was very cool. So I know—what is it? What is it? Retrospective. Right. My retrospective. Does that have to happen when I die, or it can happen because I—
Sylvia: No, no, no. I'm a big fan of retrospectives. That's one of the things I love about—because, you know, the Crone House is connecting the women still making art to the badass women collecting their work. Women are aging up, who've just been at it and at it and at it, and the breadth of work that they have in their collection, ready to be shown, is a retrospective.
After your show, I've got a retrospective of a photographer friend of mine who does all Halloween stuff that she's been doing for the last ten years as a joy project for her every October. I'll send you details. It's pretty great. She'll be installing around the same time, or it'll cross at some point. But anyways—oh, sorry. Brain fart. Rewind. Sometimes my brain goes faster than what my mouth can do.
The Crone House being focused on women of a certain age, right? And my last question for you is, what does it mean to you, celebrating that, and how does that come back into your work? That idea of what a crone and cronehood could be or is for you.
Katharine: I guess I was just talking to my friend about this. I just don't think you can be—I think of—why am I going to blank on her name now, now that we know we have limited time—Louise Bourgeois. She didn't start making sculptures until she was, like, seventies or eighties, you know, so I just don't really feel limited by age. I don't know, I think maybe because I have faced illness pretty young, before I was thirty, and have faced the fact that everyone's going to be disabled in some way, and really let go of my ableism. And via that, I think I have also let go of ageism as well.
I mean, I'm thirty-nine now—rarely have I felt like I was the oldest person in the room. And if I am, I've always made an effort to connect. I have children in my life that I love dearly and I learn from. My mentors are thirty years older than me, who I love dearly and I've learned from. So I've never in my life segregated people in their value based on age. So I think that has helped me age with beauty.
I feel perpetually twenty-seven, though. So I don't know—if I'm scrolling TikTok and girls are turning twenty-seven, I'm like, me too. I'm just always in my same—it's crazy to be twenty-seven. I'm just constantly perpetual Saturn return, you know, and I'm okay with that, because twenty-seven is, like, what? Your Saturn return. It's the year you're supposed to—your cells stop regenerating or something. I don't know, you're just supposed to have—and I feel like I've sort of embraced that every year as your Saturn return.
And I am constantly ready and willing to keep evolving—kind of what you're talking about, like, not a retrospective, or how we were talking about my website—oh yeah, if you scroll, it kind of can be all over the place. I've really had to make that decision to not segregate the work or separate—here's my ceramics website, or here's my ceramic Instagram. We are multifaceted, multilayered beings. I have to make cyanotypes to make sculptures. I have to go get ice cream with my daughter to fire the kiln. You know, all of that is.
Sylvia: Girl. Same.
Paulette: If you're listening, I just want you to know that Sylvia and I have been nodding furiously. Yes, yes, yes, everything you're saying, Katharine.
Sylvia: Yeah, absolutely. We are. Is there anything that you wish we had asked you? And how would you answer that, if we missed something? Anything that you want us to know.
Katharine: No, I feel like this was super organic and healthy and great. And I totally took notes beforehand, because I was like, she's going to ask me science questions, and I got a C in chemistry. And it's so weird that I have found myself as a chemist in a way. But, you know, I love that this actually went to this totally natural conversational element. Now I feel very validated, fulfilled, sustained.
Paulette: It was a conversation. Thank you for sharing yourself with us. We can't promise we won't call you tomorrow just to chat, so just be prepared.
Sylvia: Yeah, because this was so much fun. I have you on speed dial now. And then let's tell our audience: where can we find you outside of the house, and your next show? What are your socials? What's your website? All of that stuff.
Katharine: Yeah. I'm Katharine T. Jacobs everywhere, on every platform. I'm on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and Patreon. And it's Katharine, K-A-T-H-A-R-I-N-E, like Katharine Hepburn. And yeah, this has definitely inspired me to have more sort of blogs on these topics. I just had another friend say, oh, you should have a podcast. I'm like, what would I even talk about? But this felt so organic.
But yeah, TikTok and Instagram, all the platforms—I share my videos of my process, and also where I try to really be communicative about where I'm headed. Substack is a great place if you want it written down in a nice—otherwise you have to filter it through the—
Sylvia: The algorithm. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Katharine, for joining us today. It's just been such a delight. And thank you for being part of the Crone House and the Crone Circle. We're just so excited to have your show here at Blue Bee Cider.
Katharine: And thank you so much for all you do. I appreciate it.
Sylvia: Bye, everyone.
Outro
[Theme music plays under the outro.]
Sylvia: What a fantastic interview! Thank you so much to Katharine for spending time with me and Paulette. Katharine's show, Wild and Soft, is at Blue Bee Cider here in Richmond, Virginia, now extended to October 31st. If you want to bring one of her cyanotypes into your own collection, you can buy directly online at thecronehouse.com, or through the Wild and Soft Collector's Catalog. We offer payment plans and try-before-you-buy, so you can see it in your space first. Links in the show notes, my friend!
We want to know: what's something that stood out to you? What do you do to bring beauty into your own life? And which one of Katharine's cyanotypes speaks to you? And what is she whispering, or even yelling, at you?
And as always, sister crones, remember that collecting art should be where you feel it in your body, and that sacral “uh huh,” where you know that one piece… she belongs with you.
[Music swells and ends.]