{"id":670754,"date":"2026-07-03T00:33:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T00:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/670754\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T00:33:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T00:33:15","slug":"katherine-wolkoff-meditates-on-absence-in-her-tender-photos-of-deer-beds-colossal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/670754\/","title":{"rendered":"Katherine Wolkoff Meditates on Absence in Her Tender Photos of Deer Beds \u2014 Colossal"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last few mornings, as I\u2019ve walked with my dog up the ravine behind my house, two fawns seem to bound of thin air, racing in unison through the trees until far enough way that they stop, stare, and wait for us to pass. It\u2019s not uncommon to see several does grazing in the same woods, and I\u2019ve always wondered where they sleep. Photographer Katherine Wolkoff<\/a> followed a similar curiosity as she traversed the grassy meadows of Block Island, which sits a few miles off the coast of Rhode Island, for her series Deer Beds.<\/p>\n

Flattened by lean cervid bodies, tall grasses reveal the areas where deer bed down. They don\u2019t typically sleep in the same place every single night, but a home range<\/a> area may have several spots that they return to repeatedly. Wolkoff prints the images at nearly life size, focusing directly on the nest-like spaces in intimate, horizonless meditations on comfort, presence, care, and resilience.<\/p>\n

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When the series was first exhibited, critic Eva Diaz noted in Artforum that \u201cThe prevailing metaphor of photography is that of the hunt. Photographers shoot, even stalk, their subjects; in the case of Katherine Wolkoff\u2019s work, the absence of \u2018prey\u2019 itself becomes the subject of the project.\u201d Sometimes during a walk, the artist encounters deer nestled in the grass and they dart away, startled. Other times, the beds are already empty.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother, a science teacher, first mentioned deer beds to me, and I began walking the fields, following deer paths to find them,\u201d Wolkoff tells Colossal. \u201cThat solitary, meditative search is still central to how I work today.\u201d Broadly, her work focuses on the natural world in the Anthropocene, plumbing the relationship between humans and the land in light of the ongoing climate crisis.<\/p>\n

The artist is currently finishing a book of pinhole photographs taken from the perspective of migrating birds on Block Island. \u201cThe resulting pictures have a blurred, frantic quality that I think of as visualizing the birds\u2019 depletion: the chaos of an animal pushed to its limits over open water and unfamiliar coastline, flying through the night with no guarantee of where it will land or whether it will survive the crossing,\u201d she says. Some of these works will be part of a forthcoming exhibition centered around the Atlantic Flyway<\/a> at Benrubi Gallery<\/a> next spring.<\/p>\n

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