Kat Jacobs’ art transforms materials foraged from the woods — such as feathers and branches — into beautiful wall hangings and fiber sculptures.
The Owings Mills-based artist has gone through many different art mediums over the course of her life, including pastels, oil paintings and watercolor paintings. But naturalistic textile art has been her specialty since she started to pursue art as a full-time career.
Jacobs works as a freelance artist, creating both custom commissions and premade designs under her self-run small business, Kat Jacobs Design (sometimes known as Feathers and Fibers by Kat Jacobs). Instagram, and social media in general, have proven invaluable in launching her career as an independent artist.
Her art has been featured in exhibits at the Baltimore-based Clovr Collective, where she also had a residency, as well as at the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art in Salisbury.
Jacobs, 44, lives in Owings Mills with her husband, who is a musician, and their two daughters.
Both Jacobs and her husband are Baltimore natives, though Jacobs attended college briefly in North Carolina.
“I just wasn’t ready to embark on an educational path right after high school,” she recalls. “I needed to explore and adventure a little bit. And so I came back to Baltimore and worked various jobs, some in the restaurant industry. And I’m a huge music fan, so I traveled around a lot with different bands and musicians, and made a lot of friendships and connections.”
She later moved back to North Carolina, but settled in Baltimore when she met her husband. North Carolina is still near and dear to Jacobs’ heart and she visits with her family every year.
While Jacobs had created art from a young age, she put her arts career on pause in her twenties. She worked in The Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt and spent 10 years as a doula.
“When I left Sheppard Pratt, I really missed being in a position of empowerment for women, who were the bulk of my patients working at Sheppard Pratt,” Jacobs explains. “I wasn’t a mother as a doula, so I didn’t have that experience, but I think I just had a natural propensity to support and work with women.”
Once she had her first child, the high-stress career of a doula was no longer feasible for Jacobs, so she turned back to her love of art, initially as a means of stress relief. It was then that she first combined her passions for nature and art.
Jacobs says she’s always been an avid hiker and backpacker, and she had accumulated a collection of feathers, pieces of wood and other things she had found outside.
“I was drawn to handiwork because knitters and crocheters will attest that it’s therapeutic,” she says. “From there, I married the foraged things I had in my house with my textile work and it just kind of evolved.”
Jacobs’ fiber sculptures take as much inspiration from nature as they do materials. Her pieces often focus on the confluence of nature and the human psyche and how the two intertwine.
Her wall hangings start as watercolor sketches, but the physical products consist of dozens of feathers. Some of the materials used are gathered from the woods, with others sourced from hobbyist farmers.
Jacobs notes that she puts a lot of work into ensuring that the materials used for her art, particularly the feathers and wool, are cruelty-free and sourced using ethical methods.
“The feather industry is pretty overlooked in how cruel it is,” Jacobs says. “It’s not talked about in the way the fast fashion industry is, but it’s pretty gnarly. It was important to me that everything was sourced with high ethics. I don’t want to be a promoter or consumer of [practices that are harmful to animals].”
Many of her pieces use hen and chicken feathers, which Jacobs says that people are often surprised to learn.
“People are sometimes taken aback by that, because the chicken is such a domestic bird that people overlook as being beautiful, but they are,” she adds.
Currently, Jacobs is preparing for her art to be showcased in an upcoming exhibit at Manor Mill in Monkton, which is scheduled for early October.
She also continues to make commissioned pieces, as well as ones that are sold on her website and Instagram.
“I want the peace I get in creating my pieces to be cyclical to the collector, and I hope that is felt,” Jacobs says.