Katie Allcorn is an artist and forever student with a degree in Studio Art from Mississippi State University. After completing her emphasis in Graphic Design, she operated a freelance studio for ten years before growing desperate to ditch Adobe Creative Suite and go analog. Katie started drawing tiny landscapes at a laundromat in Texas in 2019.
Post-burnout, Katie untied her self-worth from her hustle and productivity. She started a self-compassion practice and embraced her feminine energy by slowing down, connecting with other women, feeling all her feelings, and working with her hands. After years of tiny living and working out of a backpack with baskets of dirty clothes in tow, Katie now makes images and writes personal essays during nap time in a laundry room of her own in Fayetteville, Arkansas, sometimes with her six year old daughter drawing in the seat next to her.
BIG FEELINGS COLLECTION
This limited series of prints is a reflection on Katie’s postpartum experience, the mental load of motherhood and the weight of self-sacrifice. Easily overwhelmed and prone to long funks of melancholy, Katie started mothering herself in tandem with learning how to mother her children. She reframed their shared emotional-sensitivity as a superpower and all big feelings as messengers. “Despair”, the first drawing of the series, was inspired by the dramatic body language of Katie’s daughter sobbing in the doorway, an expression of her deep care for her own creative vision and the frustration built in the process of trying to see it through.
Katie hopes to normalize the full spectrum of human emotion for her children and believes the bright spots in our stories are often the hard ones - the ones found in conflict or just past fear, the ones that force us into our true relational nature, begging us to depend on God and lean into our community. Katie carved and hand-printed linoleum for this series in an attempt to loosen up her craft of logo design, adding more free expression and making the figures less perfect and more human.
