Kristy Bishop (b. 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in weaving, color relationships, and textile traditions. Her work embraces the slowness and intimacy of intuitive material processes. Using a rigid heddle loom, Kristy weaves colorful and brightly patterned bands that are interwoven into vine-like compositions that grow, split and stretch and are handsewn into place onto organically shaped foundations. Her work explores the intersection of encroachment, overgrowth, reclamation, and succession of nature and man, such as vines taking over an abandoned house, or maps showing roads penetrating previously untouched ecosystems.

This exploration applies to her fiber sculpture using reclaimed ratchet straps from the Port of Charleston. Kristy sews them into organic and ever evolving teardrop shapes and also weaves them over used shipping boxes. The Happy Holidays gift series highlights the accumulated waste from overconsumption. The boxes are from her own purchases and woven with the infrastructural waste that are the cut ratchet straps. Her fractal sculptures turn these garishly colored straps into objects that resembles vines, seaweed or tangled trash that becomes intertwined with other organic material floating in the ocean. These pieces are malleable, dynamic and can be installed clustered on the wall, wrapped around surfaces or free standing.

Kristy is a teaching artist focusing on textile practices. She travels for artist residencies in public schools all over South Carolina, hosts adult workshops, and summer camps. Kristy partners with Engaging Creative Minds, the Charleston Museum, McClellanville Arts Council, and the Gibbes Museum of Art to facilitate workshops. In August of 2019, Kristy was the artist-in-residence at the Gibbes Museum of Art where she focused on large-scale weaving. During the fall of 2015, Kristy participated in a three-month residency at 701 Center for Contemporary Art concluding with the solo exhibition, Bound. In 2016, Kristy was awarded the South Carolina Artists’ Ventures Initiative (AVI) Grant to expand her studio practice. She was the 2012-2013 Artist-in-Residence for the City of North Charleston. Since 2020, Kristy Bishop has been a Certified Teaching Artist through the South Carolina Arts Commission. In August she is participating in artist residency at Texere in Oaxaca Mexico and will be an exhibitor for Carpet Diem Paris this October during Art Basel Paris.