Kasey Ramirez, an artist and educator, was working on a woodcut piece on Tuesday, January 13, in the printmaking studio at the Richmond Art Center. “I could do this all day,” she says, but life does get in the way sometimes. There had been an email to answer, and now a phone call to take. 

Next week students come back to the University of Hartford, where Ms. Ramirez is an assistant professor of printmaking. But this week Ms. Ramirez got to work in the RAC as an Adolf and Virginia Dehn Visiting Artist. She met with some Loomis Chaffee students as part of their classes, but anyone could wander in and out of the studio as she worked all week on a woodcut. 

“Wood,” she says, “has so much character. It’s a natural material; it has a grain to it; it has a lot of resistance to it. It doesn’t want to be shaped in certain ways, but I like the fight and the struggle in it.”  

She creates her work with gouges, line gravers, electric tools, and wire brushes. And that fight and struggle can be seen in her woodcut pieces. “My work involves what I like to call skeletal architectural in consuming environments,” she says, “like what appears to be the looming atmosphere of a storm or something like that.” 

Some of her work stems from her experience living in New Jersey when Hurricane Sandy, known to many as Superstorm Sandy, ravaged the mid-Atlantic in October 2012. The storm was the costliest natural disaster in New Jersey history, destroying nearly 350,000 homes, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. 

The storm, Ms. Ramirez says, happened at a moment when “I had been thinking about the climate and the environment, but I had never had a direct experience with any extreme weather like that.” 

“That was eye-opening,” she continues. “The scale of the destruction. ...  I just remember driving through my county, and what was previous homes looked like giant landfills. It was unsettling to have that level of destruction.” 

Ms. Ramirez says she likes to work “a bit of ambiguity in the pieces. You're not quite sure whether the piece is actively falling down or becoming destroyed. I'm interested in that state of flux when it seems it might be tipping over, a little unstable.” 

The woodcut she is working on this week is vertical; she generally works on horizontal pieces. The piece depicts a grouping of structures. It is not intended to be a single building, but rather a composite of different buildings and viewpoints, she says. Because of the vertical nature of the piece, people will be looking up at an imposing building. “I felt the natural wood grain was creating this sense of movement, of storminess in the sky,” she says. The piece evolves each day and will take time; it’s not something she can complete in a week. 

Ms. Ramirez, born in New Brunswick, N.J., has a master's of fine arts in printmaking from Indiana University and a bachelor's of fine arts in illustration from Rhode Island School of Design. She has done various forms of printmaking, her work has been widely shown in group and solo exhibitions, and she has participated in many artist residencies. 

Ms. Ramirez has taught at the University of Arkansas and Eastern Illinois University and is in her fifth year of teaching printmaking at the University of Hartford.  “It’s the best job on earth,” she says. “Whenever certain aspects of my job get me down, more the administrative part of it, I just have to remember I get to share what I love to do with students, and there is no greater gift that you could have as a human. There is an exchange of energy that working with students gives me that really charges me up.” 

She says she does not define her role as “training printmakers.” 

“I train thinkers and artists who see the world in a different way, who come up with complex solutions to different problems,” Ms. Ramirez says. “I think there is a lot of collateral learning a student gets when they study art and design that is beneficial and relevant to a wide variety of fields. I do think people want artists, even if they don't know it. They need artists, people with that creative thought process, on their teams.”