By Sena Christian

Kate Farrall vaguely recalls reading a Carol Burnett book when she was a child that was about the jobs one could have when they grew up. “I was like, OK, I want to be the artist,” she says.

Farrall’s creative career began in earnest when she got a degree in art history with a double major in photography at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She worked at a contemporary nonprofit gallery called Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, before relocating to the West Coast to attend graduate school for photography at California College of the Arts in Oakland.

“What I did was a lot of [analogue] camera-less photography and, at the time, that was not that big of a field,” Farrall says, in reference to the process of using various chemicals to manipulate light and draw out images. “Now I’ve moved on to continuing to do things in very analogue ways, but also more painting, more collage, more working with paper, sculptural elements to my pieces or maybe they’re just full-on sculptures,” she says.

One of her pieces, “Closing Loops,” is made from Juxtapoz Magazine, which she deconstructed, then sewed and wove back together into a huge wall piece. It has large loops pulled loose, to be, she says, “almost like an unraveling, but a beautiful unraveling.”

As with her camera-less photography — a concept hard for some to understand — Farrall says she tries to push the edges of what she thinks she can do with her art. “It’s very experimental,” she says. “It invites chance and mistakes, and doing things that other people would look at as wrong or a mistake.” 

Farrall’s work can be seen in her open studio at ARTHOUSE on R Street every Second Saturday. In addition to making her own art, she provides business coaching for artists, educating them on strategies, tools and techniques to bring in a sustainable income through their creative endeavors.

She says the internet and social media have allowed artists to become better-equipped as entrepreneurs — and she is in a good position to advise her peers on how to take advantage of these opportunities. After finishing graduate school, Farrall worked in marketing for a start-up to pay off her student loans. 

“I took all the information that I was learning and I started to help other artists, and I saw that what I was doing was really giving artists a lot of results. … I help artists to create $3,000 to $5,000 per month — oftentimes much more than that — so they can have a business that’s a sustainable business,” she says.

While Farrall acknowledges that the entrepreneurial life is not an easy one, for her the drive and passion to create is something she has felt since childhood.

“It’s definitely something that is important to me as a human to be able to create, and see creation as a very essential element of what we do as humans,” she says. “People often ignore this part of themselves. … I think that’s a tragedy to ignore that part, because when you don’t, you have a much fuller life.”

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.