ABOUT The Artist
Kate Huser Santucci lives and works in Dayton, Ohio. She graduated from Wright State University in 1994 with a BFA in visual art with a concentration in sculpture. She recently completed a residency in encaustic painting with artist Patricia Seggebruch and was a 2020 recipient of a Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District and Culture Works Artist Opportunity Grant, which allowed her to take classes in advanced encaustic painting techniques with artist Alicia Tormey. She has been awarded a residency at Chateau D’Orquevaux in France in 2025.
Her work has most recently been shown at the Springfield Museum of Art, Wheat Penny Oven and Bar, The Edward A. Dixon Gallery and the Dayton Society of Artists in Dayton Ohio, Studios on High in Columbus Ohio, and the Canadian Encaustic Conference Group show, “Waxing Poetic” where she was a featured speaker. Public work includes a mural in downtown Dayton on E. 3rd St., and a series of 3 pieces for the new Southeast Branch of the Dayton Metro Library. Her works are part of private collections in Dayton OH, Cincinnati OH, Los Angeles CA, St. Joseph MI, Brooklyn NY, and Lexington KY. She has an upcoming solo show at Edison State College in October 2024. Her work will be part of a group show, “Women’s Work(s)” at the Art Source Ohio Gallery in New Bremen through August 2024.
Kate started her career as a sculptor and is now working in encaustic and mixed media. The work combines beeswax, damar resin, and pigment to create luminous surfaces with many layers. She is fascinated by the natural world and finds those themes recurring in her work as she explores our connection to that world and our personal evolution within it. Her latest body of work examines our tendency to see meaning in mark making, and explore the way we instinctively seek to make connection by assigning meaning to randomness, be that graffiti, constellations, dreams, crop circles, runes, clouds, religious symbols, paintings on cave walls, tea leaves, the patterns worms leave under the bark of tree branches, or the abstract placement of letters that make up sigils. This search for clues, for patterns, and for inspiration is what makes us human, as we long for connections and try to figure out where we fit into the larger picture.