- The San Diego region is home to many artists who work in an assortment of media.

As a curator, an educator, I want to know what inspires these creatives.

This is Insights Into Art.

(upbeat music) (sewing machine whirring) Today on Insights Into Art, I'm visiting with mixed media artist, Katie Ruiz.

(upbeat music) (sewing machine whirring) Katie?

- [Katie] Oh, hey.

- Hey.

Katie is a painter, but is currently working on a series of four panels representing the elements using a rug tufting gun that is essentially a handheld sewing machine.

- Yarn art, fiber art is very slow, and so this speeds it up quite a bit.

It's an industrial type of machine that allows me to finish a rug in a few days instead of a few months.

I'm exploring different ways of doing it because some I paint a lot more on them, and other ones I tuft a lot more.

So this one is going to be mostly tufting, but if you look here at my drawings, the eyeball and the portal are going to be painted, and the rest of it is going to be rug tufting.

And then I realize that the four elements, air, water, fire, and earth, also transcend the border wall in interesting ways.

They're not really bothered by the border wall.

They pass through without being stopped.

- And do you usually sketch things out in detail?

- With the rug tufting, I have to plan it.

So that has been a challenge for me because I really do love to just sort of start making marks and sort of explore that way.

And that's how I used to work as only a painter.

But now as a textile artist, there's a lot more pre-planning.

It takes a ton of yarn.

I'm going to go through all of this yarn and more.

It'll probably take, I don't know, 50 skeins of yarn to finish this.

- Wow, wow, and then you would move on to the painting part.

- And then I'll leave everything but the portal, and then I'll paint that.

I call them combinas, combining painting and sculpture.

It's a play off Rauschenberg's combines.

And I consider myself a combina, as a mixed race person.

So it's all speaking around the same subject over and over and over again.

I've been using some of the same themes for years now.

- Well, this is very cool.

I'd love to check out one of the finished pieces.

- Yeah, so this is one of four.

So I have two others inside.

Let me show you.

- Okay.

- Come on in.

- Moving from art in progress to completed works, Katie shows me Cloud Woman, a combination tufted rug and textile and painting, as she walks me through her process.

- In this case, the background is painted and the foreground is rug.

And the frame is a hoop earring because I'm again thinking about my mixed race, my Chicano lifestyle, border crossing.

My father is from Tijuana.

And so that's sort of a play on a Rokuko frame.

And if art history buffs are around, sometimes they notice this figure comes straight from a Manet painting, Luncheon on the Grass.

So I like to weave in some art history and sort of flip the white male narrative on its head, and turn it into my own version of Luncheon in the Grass, only in this case, it's a border wall and she's a woman made of clouds.

So she can pass through the border wall.

She can pass through the portal and end up in a different sort of land on the other one side or the other.

- And I see now when you're painting all, it allows you to also do all the beautiful kind of softer textures and mixing of the color for the clouds.

- Yeah, it's a different look.

And this is actually my first piece going back to the figure in a while.

I went to grad school to paint figures like these.

These are some of my earlier works, the blanket paintings.

So again, it's actually on a textile.

I'm still playing with textiles.

I'm just doing it in a different way.

So this was me going back to the figure after a couple years of doing more abstract work, and really thinking more about more like the spiritual aspect of the human, and of the philosophies that I'm working with still.

I feel like the border portals are sort of a spiritual play on the same commentary, right?

So still, we see Mexican blankets, we see figures.

In my mind, this is still a blanket.

So I'm still working with textiles, but it all started with the painted textiles.

So now I'm actually making the textile.

- Talking about the blankets, that was another, now you're using this portal, but the blankets were also very important in a whole series of your works, right?

- Yeah, they're portals in their own way, too.

It really started as a way to abstract the figure.

And the way I did that was to throw a blanket over them, but then what blanket do you use?

Well, I should use blankets from my culture and blankets that I already had at home, which were colorful Mexican blankets.

So that's how that started, and then I became interested in the actual textile.

Well, where do Otomi patterns come from?

How do I learn Tenango stitching?

So I went to Oaxaca, I learned weaving, traditional backstrap weaving.

That led me to having all of this yarn, which turned into a whole different thing.

It turned into me using skeins of yarn in my work, weaving, crochet, and now rug tufting.

I love craft.

I love teaching craft.

And that's another thing, craft as fine art, - Which is a fairly new phenomenon because I think craft, when I was in school, everything was about new media.

Everybody was doing video, performance, installation, digital.

And now there's been this resurgence of this appreciation of the craft, which at that time was considered to be like, oh, only lesser artists or it's artwork, or artisans, or craftspeople do textile.

But this has changed in the last decade or so.

- Yeah, and thank goodness because when I started on my craft.

Well, I've always been a crafter.

I always took craft classes.

I've loved to learn things.

I love to just make things, not necessarily paintings, but like I said, crochet, weaving, knitting, rug tufting.

But thankfully, it's finally being taken seriously as an art modality, a fine art modality.

It's hard for me just to stick to one thing, and some people don't like that.

They think if you're a painter, you have to be a painter, or if you're a sculptor, you need to be a sculptor.

But I think the best artists do whatever they want.

- To get a greater insight into her work, Katie showed me her notebooks where she sketches out her ideas.

- Sometimes I just like lighting or something, so I'm practicing.

And then there's other times where I'm just imagining.

So you could see some cloud woman in here.

You can feel, again, my repeating symbols that I use over and over.

So this one actually came before.

This is my older notebook and this is my newer notebook.

So yeah, these are just some of the, and I wrote the portal is open.

- And sometimes you're drawing from your memory, or you are imagining, and then other times you're actually drawing from life.

- Yeah, then I'm drawing a chair, 'cause I like to study as well as imagine.

I think both of those practices in drawing are really important.

- [Alessandra] There's the hoop.

- [Katie] Yeah, that's earlier hoop, but it has fire in it.

- [Alessandra] The flames.

- [Katie] So the air, earth, fire, water.

There's me thinking about it, but I don't really... - [Alessandra] So you do writing mind maps and sketches.

- [Katie] Yeah, sometimes it's just words.

- [Alessandra] Sketches are that so revealing of people's thoughts and processes.

I think that's one of the fascinations when art historians go back in time.

Yeah, they love sketches.

- [Katie] I got to be more careful what I write because no one's going to read it.

- [Alessandra] It's been fun meeting with Katie.

She sees the art in crafting, and is willing to explore different media to turn her concepts into completed works of art, whether through traditional painting, rock making, or both.

Thank you, Katie.

(upbeat music)