Karin Kohlmeier

I unexpectedly discovered my calling as a visual artist while I was pursuing my PhD in English. My first year of coursework included two courses by the renowned Queer Theory scholar Eve Kosofsy Sedgwick. It’s no exaggeration to say that these two classes changed the entire course of my life—although not at all in the way I expected them to.

The classes were “Victorian Textures” where we read Victorian novels and discussed them in terms of texture, and “Zero, Infinity, Chaos, Sublimity” where we discussed poetry in terms of things like chaos theory, infinity, feedback loops, fractals, Zen Buddhism, and abstract art. For each class we were asked to keep a weekly journal—a texture journal and a chaos journal, respectively—where we were invited to play with ideas and riff on anything whatsoever as long as it was somehow related to the topic.

So for an entire school year I made a point of noticing the textures and patterns and details around me…the interesting pattern in the rust on an old hinge, the beautiful swirls the bubbles made when the building super poured mop water into the gutter, the way the blue words unfolded onto the page from the tip of my pen as I took notes in class, the way the light changed when a bird to...