I am a poet, naturalist, printmaker and sculptor. I was born in California and attended the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland. My tutor there was Ludovica Hainisch-Marchet, a writer, linguist and the first woman to run for the presidency of Austria. My degree in Studio Art is from the University of California at Santa Barbara where I specialized in sculpture and printmaking studying lithography with Steven Cortright and bronze casting with Robert Thomas. I also studied Japanese papermaking with Sukey Hughes, author of Washi: The World of Japanese Paper. In 1983 I assisted the English sculptor, Prudence Leach, with the casting of a wall-sized relief mural for the Santa Barbara Women’s Health Center.
I received a commission to create the bronze relief to dedicate the September 11 Memorial at Freedom Grove in Reston, Virginia and a commission for a bronze relief to dedicate the Woodland Garden at the Walker Nature Education Center in Reston. Over the years I have developed a sculptural technique that uses both bas relief and Egyptian relief to create imagery. I am working on a series of bronze reliefs that bring together image and poetry, the most recent project being a portrait of the writer and anthropologist, Loren Eiseley.
The Dog of Knots, my middle grade children’s novel published in 2004, was a ForeWord Book of the Year Finalist and was added to the Israel Book Connection List, a bibliography created by the Anti-Defamation League of positive children’s books about Israel. I have written poetry since I was fifteen and my current projects include poem-prints that are based on surimono, a collaborative technique between printmakers and poets practiced in Japan from1790 to 1830. I use both lithography and white-line woodcut. My glass, lithograph, and oak sculptures were included in the “Aquifer” WPA/WSG exhibit in 2008. Two of my poems were included in the Workhouse Arts Center Poetic Art exhibit in September, 2010.
My fine press and artist’s books have been exhibited at the Pyramid Atlantic Book Arts Fair Invitational at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and are in collections including the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, The Stanford University Library, and Special Collections at Library of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
I live in Reston with my husband. My adult daughter also lives in Reston with her family.
Kathy Walden Kaplan
