PIQUA — The Edison State Community College Art Department will feature artist Kate Huser Santucci during its October exhibition. The department will display the exhibit, “Wax and Wane,” in the Anne Vaccaro and David Myers Gallery at the Piqua Campus during normal campus hours from Oct. 4 to 25.

Santucci started her career as a sculptor and now works in encaustic and mixed media. Her work combines beeswax, damar resin, and pigment to create luminous surfaces with many layers. She fuses each layer with a torch, then builds up and scrapes back layers to reveal and obscure symbols and images. Fascinated by the natural world, Santucci finds those themes recurring in her work as she explores our connection to the world and our personal evolution within it.

“As I worked with the layers in these pieces, I was drawn to the idea of signs and sigils, which are symbols that are thought to have magical value, a power, a spell, a way of connecting to something beyond our concrete understanding, a prayer of intention. I use these techniques to explore themes such as communication, time, place, and our perception of the way things change, both in the short and long term,” Santucci said.

Her latest body of work examines our tendency to see meaning in mark-making and explores how we instinctively seek to make connections by assigning meaning to randomness, be that graffiti, constellations, dreams, crop circles, runes, clouds, religious symbols, paintings on cave walls, tea leaves, the patterns worms leave under the bark of tree branches, or the abstract placement of letters that make up sigils. Santucci believes this search for clues, patterns, and inspiration is what makes us human, as we long for connection and try to figure out where we fit into the larger picture.

“My current body of work combines both abstract mark-making and figurative realism to help convey my thoughts on how we interpret meaning and context in our struggle to understand one another, our world, and our role in it,” said Santucci. “My work involves multiple layers and textures, inviting the viewer to look deeper into the piece and glimpse imagery floating beneath the surface of the wax.”

Living and working in Dayton, Santucci graduated from Wright State University in 1994 with a BFA in visual art with a concentration in sculpture. She completed a residency in encaustic painting with artist Patricia Seggebruch in 2019. She was a 2020 recipient of a Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District and Culture Works Artist Opportunity Grant, which allowed her to take classes in advanced encaustic painting techniques with artist Alicia Tormey.

Santucci has a show at the Dutoit Gallery in Dayton opening in January 2025. Art Source Ohio Gallery in New Bremen, the Springfield Museum of Art, the Edward A. Dixon Gallery in Dayton, Studios on High in Columbus, and the Dayton Society of Artists have most recently shown her work. Santucci’s public work includes a mural in downtown Dayton on East 3rd Street and a three-piece series for the Southeast Branch of the Dayton Metro Library.

For more information about the exhibit, email Greg Clem, Edison State Professor of Fine Arts, at [email protected].