Kathryn Polk

Limerick Institute of Technology, LSAD was delighted to host world famous printmaker Kathryn Polk for a series of talks. 

Kathryn is an extraordinary illustrator and lithographer. Printmaking changed her life after a long and thriving career in business she gave it all up to become a very successful artist. She is now one of the best-known female lithographers in the US. 

Kathryn Polk was born in 1952 in Memphis, Tennessee where she studied Fine Art at The Memphis College of Art and The University of Memphis. Polk moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1983 with her husband Andrew Polk, a fellow lithographer.  In 2017 Polk and her husband relocated to a farm near Bloomington, Indiana where they have set up L VIS Press.

The subject matter of Kathryn Polk’s art focuses on everyday activities, chores, relationships between women, mothers, and daughters and so on, often with the same characters recurring in different works. Most incredible is the fact that Polk only started making lithographs in 2002 when she was in her 50s. Since then, her prints have been exhibited widely, her work in many collections around the world including China, New Zealand, Korea, Wales, France, and Argentina as well as museums though out the United States. Of her working process she notes “Music is such a critical aspect for me, I literally choreograph the music that will get me through this process and when I’m graining a stone, I have to have something so hard and so fast to get me through graining. When I’m printing, I need a rhythm to move me on … music gets me through it. It paces me.”