Kat Scott doesn’t see pallet wood just for its utilitarian purposes the way most people see it. Instead she sees the hidden potential that often lies not far below the surface in the patterns and color of the wood grain.
A trained illustrator with a degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design, wood has become Scott’s favorite medium of late. For the past year and a half, she has been using pallet wood to create beautiful mosaic wall hangings, furniture and other items. And she also makes beautiful natural wood planters from fallen dead trees left in the woods.
“I like the surprise that comes with it,” Kat Scott said of working with wood. “A lot of times my thoughts are very structured so it’s always interesting the surprise that wood brings, especially when you plane it.”
For someone whose art focused heavily on painting in the past, the young artist said she is often inspired by what she discovers in the wood. She explained, “Wood helps me a lot. It is more inspirational to work with wood. With painting, all the inspiration comes from yourself.”
She also says that “pallet wood has more character than wood you just go buy at the store.”
“It’s not surprising that Scott was drawn to pallet wood,” commented her father, Matt Scott. “She literally grew up surrounded by pallets at my former business, Skidz Recycling in Indianapolis.”
From the time she was five, she would come to his warehouse after school along with her brother Erik and climb on the pallets and play at the small business. As she got older, she moved up to filling plug boxes, and doing other chores around the shop.
Kat recalled that she spent a lot of time at the shop with her dad because her mom, now a retired physician, was at that time finishing her residency. “We had free reign of the pallet shop,” she said.
After going away to art school and completing her degree, Kat said she spent some time traveling and also taught English in Japan for a year, before settling down again in Indianapolis. She first became interested in making art from pallet wood after sketching on some wood panels, which she liked doing because of the texture and grain. Then her dad wanted her to make something else out of wood, and that’s when she began experimenting and collaborating with him.
“I’d also try projects I’d find online. A lot of my early works were experiments,” said Kat, who works from a home studio in Indianapolis.
Although Matt Scott sold his business to Kamps Pallets seven years ago, he said his daughter couldn’t stay away from pallets. “She is now 27 and combining her love of wood recycling and her art degree to create some pretty amazing pieces of recycled art. Every few weeks she goes down to our old yard at Kamps, picks out pieces from the bins of wood, takes them home, and discovers what is hidden beneath all that dust and dirt.”
“I load ‘em up and bring them back and have to clear all the nails out. Then I go through each board and decide if I like one of the sides, then if I do, I plane down the other side. That’s how I can tell if there’s a really cool grain to it,” explained Kat.
She goes slowly, taking off about an eighth of an inch at the time. When crafting smaller pieces from the wood, she often just looks at the piece and gets an idea from the wood, whereas with the larger pieces, she often tries to come up with a design idea first.
“It’s usually a loose idea,” Kat said, describing how she looks at different pieces of wood to decide whether they’d look better in straight lines, diagonals, triangles or other shapes in the mosaic patterns. Then she has a table set up for loosely fitting the pieces together before making final cuts, gluing them to a backing and framing them.
Kat believes she leans toward mosaic patterns because they tend to be two-dimensional just like paintings. She also said her designs are becoming more complex with time and as her equipment and woodworking skills improve. While her earliest pieces had only 18-20 pieces of wood, some of her more recent pieces have had closer to 100 pieces.
Learning to use woodworking tools has been one of Kat’s biggest challenges. In the past year and half, she has had to become skilled in handling a miter saw, planer, table saw and table sander. Her dad, who is a do-it-yourselfer, taught her how to use the tools, she said.
“He’s more three-dimensional than I am,” she also said of her dad. “We bounce ideas off each other. Then we’ll go back and each make a small prototype” when coming up with new products.
Besides her beautiful wall hangings, furniture and planters, Kat commented that she and her dad have been coming up with ideas for small items like candleholders that are ideal to sell at festivals, which she is gearing up for this fall and winter.
She also makes items for Kamps Pallets and Custom Pallet Recycling, another business her dad started, to distribute as holiday gifts, and has her items for sale in several art stores in Indiana including Homespun in Indianapolis; the Ferrer Gallery in Nashville; Gather Handmade Shop in Bloomington; and in Louisville, Kentucky, her work is sold at Block Party Homemade Boutique.
To see more of Kat Scott’s work or to contact her about an art project, visit her website at http://www.katscottillustrator.com.
