In recent mornings, during my walks with my dog up the ravine behind my house, two fawns appear to magically emerge from nowhere, sprinting together through the trees. Once they are at a safe distance, they stop and watch us pass by. It’s common to see several does feeding in these woods, and I’ve often wondered about their sleeping spots. Photographer Katherine Wolkoff shared a similar curiosity, which led her to explore the grassy meadows of Block Island, located a few miles off the coast of Rhode Island, for her series Deer Beds.
Tall grasses, flattened by the slender bodies of deer, mark the locations where they rest. Deer often rotate their sleeping spots within their home range, returning to several favored areas. Wolkoff enlarges these images to nearly life size, emphasizing the nest-like spaces in her meditative reflections on comfort, presence, care, and resilience.
When the series debuted, critic Eva Diaz observed 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 the artist discovers deer resting in the grass during her walks, and they flee, startled. At other times, the beds are vacant.
Wolkoff shares, “My mother, a science teacher, first mentioned deer beds to me, and I began walking the fields, following deer paths to find them. That solitary, meditative search is still central to how I work today.” Her broader work delves into the natural world during the Anthropocene, examining the complex relationship between humans and the environment amidst the ongoing climate crisis.
Currently, Wolkoff is completing a book of pinhole photographs capturing the viewpoint 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 explains. Some of these works will feature in an upcoming exhibition focused on the Atlantic Flyway at Benrubi Gallery next spring.
