The last few mornings, as I’ve 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’s not uncommon to see several does grazing in the same woods, and I’ve always wondered where they sleep. Photographer Katherine Wolkoff 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.
Flattened by lean cervid bodies, tall grasses reveal the areas where deer bed down. They don’t typically sleep in the same place every single night, but a home range 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.
When the series was first exhibited, critic Eva Diaz noted in Artforum that “The prevailing metaphor of photography is that of the hunt. Photographers shoot, even stalk, their subjects; in the case of Katherine Wolkoff’s work, the absence of ‘prey’ itself becomes the subject of the project.” Sometimes during a walk, the artist encounters deer nestled in the grass and they dart away, startled. Other times, the beds are already empty.
“My mother, a science teacher, first mentioned deer beds to me, and I began walking the fields, following deer paths to find them,” Wolkoff tells Colossal. “That solitary, meditative search is still central to how I work today.” 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.
The artist is currently finishing a book of pinhole photographs taken from the perspective of migrating birds on Block Island. “The resulting pictures have a blurred, frantic quality that I think of as visualizing the birds’ 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,” she says. Some of these works will be part of a forthcoming exhibition centered around the Atlantic Flyway at Benrubi Gallery next spring.
