Kara Garrett is an artist living and working in Durham, NC. She began her art degree in 1989 in the BFA program at Arizona State University before taking a 17-year hiatus from her education to raise her two sons. Kara now holds a BA in Studio Art with a focus in printmaking from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (2014). She has had her prints featured in a solo show at the Ann Flack Boseman Gallery in Wilmington, NC, as well as several group shows. She works mostly in screen printing and relief but also prints using varied intaglio processes.

I was an artist at the age of five, when I started copying the Sunday Comics in my hometown of Holly Springs, North Carolina. I followed my passion for art through school and completed an art degree at East Carolina University. A simple soapstone carving made me fall in love with the ability to shape one of the hardest materials on Earth with my own hands; I knew I would be a sculptor.

I have worked with found objects and wood since childhood and find it hard to resist. The drive may have to do with a wish to communicate visually, a desire to preserve the beauty in carefully crafted but discarded objects, or perhaps simply from the reaffirming smell of freshly cut wood. 

The first time I saw a letterpress shop, I knew I was doomed. Luckily for me, a fascination that began when I was 19 has turned into a career as a printer.

I love working on machines that have their own histories that I feel only add to what I can do with them. I love the smell of the ink and the feel of working with type or polymer and the tactile process and result of feeding paper into a press.