Judy Pfaff: Assistant Kate Hodges
In the time that Kate Hodges has worked for Judy Pfaff, she has sculpted using a myriad of eccentric materials to help Pfaff realize her visions. “She’s had me working with steel, working with stumps, big trees, working on all kinds of stuff.” says Hodges.
Hodges relishes the inherent sense of community she finds in Pfaff’s studio, as she works with “all kinds of people,” describing Pfaff herself as “a very giving person”—an artist whose ego doesn’t “get in the way.” Hodges asserts with a smile, “She’s just a real human being.”
Credits
Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Judy Pfaff. Thanks: Kate Hodges
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Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Judy Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments, in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between the two- and three-dimensional. Her work is a complex ordering of visual information, composed of steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and natural elements such as tree roots. She has extended her interest in natural motifs in a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations, and has developed her dramatic sculptural materials into set designs for several theatrical stage productions.
