Katie Hudnall: The Longest Distance between Two Points

Katie Hudnall makes tools, furniture, and objects that are perfectly suited for a peculiar world. The first museum-organized solo presentation of Hudnall’s unique and captivating work, The Longest Distance between Two Points reveals a rare glimpse into the artist’s rich inner world. Here, the absurd and mechanically improbable merges with fine woodworking and salvaged wood materials to bring mechanisms and structures to life and action.

The Longest Distance between Two Points represents Hudnall’s most ambitious work yet. At the center of the exhibition is a complex interactive installation centering on a monumental cabinet for treasures found and carefully arranged by the artist. This idiosyncratic take on the Wünderkammer, made with reverence for the eccentric collector that lives in all of us, is no mere piece of storage furniture: every pull of a drawer instigates a specific response elsewhere in the space, highlighting the delight in the “inefficient beauty of roundabout function” as actions traverse meandering paths from gesture to outcome.

Katie Hudnall received her BFA in Sculpture from the Corcoran College of Art & Design and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Furniture Design/Woodworking. Hudnall lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she runs the Woodworking and Furniture Program at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. When she’s not teaching, she spends her time making tools for problems both real and imagined.

Hudnall’s distinctive work is held in public and private collections and has been presented in exhibitions throughout the United States, including Making a Seat at the Table: Women Transform Woodworking (Museum for Art in Wood, 2019). She was a 2016 artist fellow in the Museum’s Windgate International Turning Exchange residency and a 2022 documentary artist fellow in the Windgate Arts Residency Program in Wood (WARP Wood).

Katie Hudnall: The Longest Distance between Two Points is supported by a grant from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Special thanks to Mariah Moneda and Sam Northcut. The exhibition is generously supported by the Cambium Giving Society of the Museum for Art in Wood, The Bresler Foundation, The Klorfine Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, William Penn Foundation, and Windgate Foundation. In-kind support was provided by Boomerang, Inc.