About Kat and Oxide:

Hi! I’m Kat - the owner and sole bookbinder behind Oxide Press & Bindery. I make every book, box, and print by hand with traditional bookbinding and printmaking tools. When I’m not bookbinding or teaching, I like to watercolor paint our rock, flora, and fauna siblings.

As a bookbinder and artist, I maintain a foundational commitment to care for our environment and each other. I use foraged earthen and botanical pigments to hand dye book cloth and use sustainable, chlorine, and acid free papers from renewable resources like post-consumer waste, straw, hemp, and recycled cotton. Oxide Press specializes in creating book cloth from fabric that would otherwise end up in the waste stream.

Oxide’s Name:

I founded Oxide Press & Bindery in 2019, with the first edition of Erosion, a letterpress and intaglio print book that connects surveillance capitalism to gold mining practices in California. Before the law can catch up to technology, extraction processes erode the environment and civil rights - all for profit. The first time I foraged for pigment was at a defunct gold mine - the pigments were discarded with the rubble. Throughout our collective history, these iron oxide pigments, created within the caldera of our planet and risen to the surface through tectonic action, have been used for spiritual purposes. Oxide Press’ name honors these pigments and centers interdependency with our planet.