Kady Ruth Ashcraft in Residence at Paper Machine

Paper Machine welcomes Brooklyn-based artist Kady Ruth Ashcraft to Paper Machine. She will be working on a series of poetic and comedic broadsides to be hung in unexpected public spaces throughout the city. 

Kady Ruth says about her work, “I want to bring humor into the public sphere. At the crux of the work I produce is the limits of language and how it both connects and fails us as a communication tool. This has led to a lot of my work being comedic in tone, finding humor in the gaps of understanding between individuals or even individuals misunderstanding themselves. The gift of being a writer is that it’s opened up a variety of creative mediums for me to explore my fascination with the limits of language. I work as a poet, filmmaker, printmaker, standup comedian, embroiderer, digital artist, and essayist. 

By disrupting the way we communicate, be it through purposeful miscommunications and errors or the literal space laughter opens up in the flow of speech, my hope is that folks can turn a critical eye onto our own tendencies to put language on auto-pilot. By breaking down our main form of communication, I want to open up alternative avenues to do so.”