Kathryn Polk | out of the wardrobe

Written by Miranda K. Metcalf | Published 20 nov 2019

If any one hasn’t listened to Dolly Parton’s America podcast yet, what have you been doing with your time? It’s only nine episodes and I know you’ve got long hours in the studio to put in this weekend. I’m on episode four and I’ve laughed and/or cried at every episode so far. Regardless of your feelings about “The Iron Butterfly,” the series is a deep dive in cultural crossroads and the stories that we tell. More specifically, the stories that Parton tells. There is a whole episode dedicated to “The Tennessee Mountain Trance” a phenomenon in which when someone from Tennessee starts speaking and the listener gets so caught up in the story that they can’t form rebuttals or questions. Series’ host, Jad Abumrad, fell under this trance, when interviewing Parton. Abumrad is something of a podcast legend, he is a co-host of Radiolab - one of the first great radio shows - and one of the pioneering podcasts. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that without Abumrad, there may never have been a pine|copper|lime. When I was in my early twenties, I used to stay home on Saturday nights to listen to This American Life and Radiolab back-to-back on my local public radio station. So the fact that a podcast vetran like Abumrad found himself powerless at the hands of one of the finest Tennessee story-tellers makes me understand a little bit better what happened to me when I sat down to interview Kathryn Polk. I called Polk at her now home far out in the woods --down a long dirt road and a right at the concrete factory-- in Indiana for a chat, but we had never spoken before. The interview and the timezone calculations between Sydney and Chicago had all been shored up in a handful of Instagram DMs. I didn’t know what to expect when she picked up the phone, but it quickly became clear to me that she was one of the most proficient storytellers I’d ever invited to speak with me. My best strategy was to just step back, get out of the way, and enjoy a little Tennessee trance. 

Kathryn Polk, actually goes by her middle name. She says she can tell who’s a friend and who isn’t by how someone addresses her. Ella, her given first name, is only used in business and in banking. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and (her words, not mine) wasn’t anything special growing up. “I wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t smart. I wasn’t exceptional, with maybe the exception of art,” she said matter of factly. Art was her tool to communicate, and as early as three she remembers drawing. They grew up going to church, and her mother, an artist herself, would tell bible stories and draw them as she went. Polk would draw to her 45 records of rock and roll music, likely to her mother’s horror. When she wasn’t drawing, Polk would personify everything. She gendered the silverware and played with her food. She spent a lot of time alone. She drew in church as well, but more to pass the time, as sitting still and listening weren’t her strong suits. 

The family didn’t have a lot of money, and Polk grew up wearing hand-me-downs from her sister that were hand-me-downs from the cousins before her. “By the time they got to me the elastic was all worn out and my pants were always falling down,” she remembers. So she used drawing as a way to connect with other people, and her peers in her grade. When she would play she would build these monumental structures, which stood out in the neighborhood. People would come by to participate in her creations. Polk would get the whole block to help in building something up in the front yard.

She went to art school, but never finished. It was there that she met and fell in love with her husband, Andy Polk, who she followed to graduate school. Back when all towns had a newspaper and all newspapers hired artists, she got work as an illustrator drawing adverts for discount mattresses and the like to help pay the bills. Polk drew some strange things in her years in this position, but she was good at it. She could draw well and she could draw fast, but there was one problem: she often didn’t like the feedback she received from the art directors. “So the best thing I could think of to do would be to take their jobs,” she says. This is when her long sabbatical from art making began. Polk kept moving up the corporate ladder until she was president of a company in Tucson, Arizona, where she managed back end database solutions for Fortune 500 Companies. As she strings together that list of words she seems to find them a little foreign in her mouth. She pauses and then adds, “...if you can believe that.” She managed big accounts, her clients in New York judged her on what designer she wore to the meeting that day. The problem was that she had come so far from anything creative or anything that fed her soul. Then one day she called Andy and said, “I can’t do this anymore as of today.” So she got him to meet her at a restaurant to help her tell the owner of the company that she was walking away from it all and the six-figure salary. Polk left that day and decided to start making art again. “What good is all the money in the world if it drives you crazy?” she asked.

“I felt like a pony that had been on a treadmill and then gets turned out to 600 acres of pasture. You’re intimidated, you don’t know what to do with that,” Polk remembers of the time. “The thing that helped was my sketchbook, those sketchbooks are your ticket to a place to fail.” She describes her process as being completely driven by drawing anything and everything in sketchbooks. Then getting a morsel of something she likes here and there, and then pulling it together into something good. 

Her first introduction to printmaking - other than being married to a lithographer for years - was woodblock carving while on a trip to New Zealand. She dove in hard and fast making 12 editions in the first month she was back, but she still missed drawing. That is when she approached Andy to teach her lithography. Once she figured out that lithography allowed her to multiply her sketches, there was no going back. She committed herself fully to the medium, but says it took ten years for her to truly feel like she was truly an artist. If she could get her hands on what she made during those first six years, she'd burn it.

Polk has an incredible and distinctive aesthetic. The prints feel nostalgic and completely modern at the same time. Her delicate pallet and the vintage clothes give her work a gentle feel when the content is anything but. When I ask her how she came to find her voice in these ways she says, “I quit expecting anything back from making art… When I quit worrying about what people thought of me things clicked. The interesting thing is people actually noticed me more when I quit trying. Trying to please that is.”

When she returned to art making she also returned, so to say, to her own family. During the years when she was president of the media company, she was working seventy hours a week. She had to fight to get time for her husband and children, let alone anyone beyond that. As an artist, she started trying to understand where she came from to help understand who she was and is. She and her mother where always very close, but as she went on the journey she became curious about the women in her extended family. Polk’s family and family dynamics started to appear in coded ways within her visual lexicon. She developed her own iconography and symbols relating to it all, but is very conscious about not revealing the direct meaning behind them. Once when she did begin to tell people what the symbols stood for during a university lecture she says, “you could feel a windsheer.” Putting the darkness and dysfunctionality of her work into words, taking that pain out of the realm of symbolism and into the fluorescent light of a college class room, made the temperature of the room palpably drop. 

In Polk’s process she never draws from photos, she can clearly hold her own in a figure drawing class, but she intentionally creates figures that look like a primitive memory of what the body looks like. Her color palette reflects this simplicity as well, but her use of tints to create her images is anything but simple. Rather unusually, Polk prints her key stone - the black color - first, and then works her way back adding color. She does this because she likes to be able to react to the print as she goes, adding colors that she determines the image needs as it comes to life. Using tinted colors she can use 5 layers to make an image look like it has 12, speeding up the printing process while at the same time making uncommonly refined and complex lithographs. “I would rather be making my next print,” she says of the printing process, “I want the art to stay fresh. If you’re around an image too long it can wear you down a bit. I always appreciate a little momentum.”

Polk is interested in women and the way women are treated in different parts of the world. Yet, she is also well aware of, and places her practice within, our post-gender time. For her, she has a hard time when she feels like anyone is being alienated because of how they appear, particularly within family units. When I asked her about this she mentions the song “Out of the Wardrobe” by The Kinks. The song tells the story of a married couple in which the male half of the pair, Dick, is interested in dressing in women’s clothes. He’s not gay, it’s just “when he puts on that dress / he looks like a princess”. The song has a happy ending in which opening up to his wife about his needs deepens their connection and their relationship. Now Dick wears all the women’s clothes he likes, and his wife wears trousers and smokes a pipe. Eventually their friends come around to it all and the song ends with this verse:

He's out of the wardrobe and he's feeling alright 

He's out of the wardrobe and he's feeling satisfied 

Now it's farewell to the past 

The secret's out at last 

He's out of the wardrobe and now he's got no regrets

Polk hates the superficial typecasting we do with our clothes, and hopes we’re getting to the point where you just become a human being.

“I want to see everyone being safe and I want in my work to speak to things that bother me. My drawings are childlike colors and poses, like Dick and Jane books, but there’s a darkness. Right now I’m feeling a lot about our politics that is hard for my head, and the fact that society has all these rules that it casts on our children.”

The Polks spent spent over 30 years in Tucson before moving to Indiana to be closer to their family. Now they’re printing all the time, the studio is about 20 ft away from the house. “This is our dream. This is what you might call the last stop,” she said of the move. A lot of the iconography she created from their time in the desert originated around icons of survival. Her chosen totem was the Cactus Wren, a bird that makes its nest in the in the prickly plants that other animals can’t get near. With the move, Polk has shed some of her icons for new ones. Centipedes and poison ivy now appear with regularity in her lithographs, all which have their own meaning. Some of these meanings she shares with us, others she does not. This is what places Polk’s work is such an interesting space emotionally. While it is so very much for her, about her, and serves the ideas she needs to explore, by holding back some of the story she invites us in, to bring our own narrative to viewing her work. The invite comes with gentle colors and non-threatening forms, and once we have arrived in her world, the specificity of the content gives us no other choice than to start to decode what we are seeing, often by placing ourselves and our family into the scene. “In my work I want it to have a depth of freedom of interpretation because maybe there’s something in there that someone needs to hear more than what I was trying to say,” Polk said. Her Tennessee storytelling works its magic on all of us, giving us the generous space to see what we need to see and perhaps to help survive.

Kathryn Polk is represented by the Wally Workman Gallery in Austin, Texas and the David Dominguez Gallery in Tucson, Arizona.

Kathryn Polk on Instagram.