Katie Hudnall’s interest in woodmaking stems from her childhood hobby of putting things together and taking them apart. “I was not a very good student when I was a kid, but I was good at drawing and puzzles,” Hudnall tells Observer. “When it came time for me to pick a career path, my dad very sweetly said, ‘You’re not very good at the rest of school—do you want to go to art school?’ and he helped me find an art school.” She attended Corcoran College of Art and Design, initially intending to focus on drawing, painting and illustration. Once there, she started drawing little illustrations of rooms full of creepy furniture in a style similar to Edward Gorey, and it wasn’t long before she realized that instead of just drawing them, she could make them. That’s how she moved into sculpture.

In her sculpture classes, Hudnall learned to create art with different materials, but she didn’t know how to manipulate wood until she took a job working for a sculptor who was also a woodworker. The sculptor and her husband, a furniture restoration artist, showed Hudnall how to build long-lasting wooden structures and recommended her for graduate studies. Hudnall went on to earn her master of fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University, developing her style as she learned to work with the material.

Many of her stylistic choices were pulled not from furniture but from industrial architecture and other built infrastructure. “A master of fine arts is not about making perfect objects. It’s about finding your visual voice: what is your style? What does your work look like? What do you want to say with it?” Hudnall explains. “The development of my style was much more complicated than a linear line from A to B; it was a process of trial and error.”

Wood interests Hudnall because of its ubiquitousness. “Everyone has a relationship with wooden objects. We all use things that are like our body, sized spoons, pencils, desks, chairs up to the buildings, and we all have this kind of relationship to it,” she says. That the material also has its own life written onto it, with the passing of years etched on every board in the pattern of rings, is something she finds particularly beautiful and inspiring.

Hudnall often uses recycled wooden objects in the making of her artwork. “People throw wood away all the time. I spend a lot of time climbing into dumpsters or stopping on the sidewalks and picking up old furniture and taking it back to my studio space to reassemble or reuse them.” She also looks for construction or house renovation sites and picks up discarded wood furniture. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches, has a tradition called Hippy Christmas in May when graduating students leave their furniture on the sidewalks for others to take. “There’s a lot of beautiful old material that gets thrown out every day because the pieces are too small or too big to be usable again, and I don’t mind taking the time or the labor.”