Apr 2, 2026 – May 17, 2026
Exhibition Description
Hand and machine are two words that may appear to be diametrically opposed. Yet, this exhibition of works by six textile artists – Kristy Bishop, Amalia Galdona Broche, Catharine Ellis, Amy Putansu, Jon Eric Riis, and Christine Tedesco – using different techniques and equally distinct styles illustrate that the opposite may be true.
At the core of each practice is the tool. The loom weaves, and the sewing machine joins and assembles. Through these processes, a nuanced relationship emerges; one defined by repetition, sequence, and variation found in each artist’s work.
From centuries-old techniques to new approaches rooted in experimentation, By Hand & Machine exposes the interconnected nature of making. In doing so, it affirms that the hand and the machine are not opposing forces, but collaborative “tools” that support both tradition and innovation.
This exhibition is a part of Handwork 2026, a nationwide initiative highlighting craft for the 250th anniversary of America.
Did you miss the By Hand & Machine Conversation that took place via zoom on May 11? Watch the recording here!
Participating Artists:
Kristy Bishop
Biography
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.
Artist Statement
Amalia Galdona Broche
Biography
Through textiles, sculpture and installation, Amalia Galdona Broche’s work materializes a psychological landscape of displacement. She examines history, cultures, and belief systems to investigate the process of transculturation and to weave alternative histories and mythologies. Originally from Santa Clara, Cuba, she has lived in the US since her adolescence. Galdona Broche earned a BFA and a BA in Sculpture and Art History from Jacksonville University, and an MFA in Art Studio from the University of Kentucky. She has participated in residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, The Banff Centre, the Hambidge Center, The New York Academy of Art, etc., and has shown her work at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY; Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, California; The Parachute Factory, Lexington, KY; 48h Neukölln, Berlin, and more. Amalia Galdona Broche currently lives in Providence, RI where she teaches in the Textiles Department at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Artist Statement
Relying on the ancient history of textiles in human development, my work uses fibers and mixed media to translate memories into drawings, tapestries, sculptures, and site-specific installations. Having left Cuba at a young age and as a way of negotiating my own displacement, I create alternative worlds that are inviting, somehow familiar, yet uncomfortable and mystical. Rather than relying on either a native or adopted language, I depend on my artistic practice to share and express an identity that is multilingual and nuanced, a complicated contradiction of silent endurance and Caribbean warmth.
My relationship to imagery, objects, and materials reveals a nation’s collective mentality of scarcity that impels me to hold onto, to repurpose, and to reconfigure materials. I weave, knot, braid, and stitch together materials, reconfiguring color, textures, and surface qualities, accumulating materials in layers that cover, conceal, or complicate surfaces. This process extends the material’s life and redefines its functionality. Relying on our intimate relationship with textiles as a second skin, I emphasize their role as a protective layer shielding us from physical, social, emotional, and spiritual threats.
Rooting myself in craft traditions and the invisible labor of women, my work negotiates disrupted histories and lost traditions of identities operating in diaspora. Memories of Cuba are always present as remnants of a life, whisps and threads of a remembered tropical landscape, Communist dogma, Catholicism, Marian devotions, Canarian and West African cultures in diaspora, and the power of listening to those that came before us. My aim for the future is to continue a conversation about lost histories, diasporic displacement, collective memories, feminism, and overall, to express a human need to connect and communicate, beyond the limitations of language, time, or geography.
Catharine Ellis
Biography
Catharine Ellis has been a weaver and a dyer for over 40 years. After three decades of teaching the Fiber Program at Haywood Community College in NC she is now dedicated to studio work, focusing on natural dye processes. She also does specialized, selected teaching, in the U.S. and internationally. Recent projects include teaching natural dyeing in Guatemalan through Mayan Hands.
Catharine is the originator of the woven shibori process and author of the instructional book, Woven Shibori (Interweave Press, 2005). Her textile work is shown extensively in exhibitions and shows. She is currently working collaboratively with the Oriole Mill in NC to produce specialty Jacquard fabrics.
Catharine is actively involved in the Surface Design Association, the World Shibori Network, and is a founding member of the Southeastern Fiber Educators Association. She has served on the boards of Penland School of Crafts and the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design and established the Western North Carolina Textile Study Group in 2012.
Amy Putansu
Biography
Amy Putansu was born and raised in the northern fishing village of Clark Island, Maine. The heritage of the name Putaansuu is Finnish, originating from the town of Siikajoki. Her great-grandfather immigrated to the United States to work in the granite quarries of Maine. Her family has not moved far—geographically or socioeconomically—and Amy’s childhood along the rocky coast shaped her sense of place, culture, and way of being in the world: a sparseness of landscape, a seafaring language, and an ethic of manual work. Her first memory of fiber is of her father knitting heads for lobster traps.
Amy was the first in her family to attend a four-year college, an experience that set the course for the next thirty years. After earning her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, she has continued to work with textiles and weaving. She received high praise for her wearable work from the American Craft Council and from collectors such as Martha Stewart and Jack Lenor Larsen. Before the age of thirty, her work was acquired by the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery.
In 2008, Amy became a full-time teacher of weaving and dyeing in rural western North Carolina. She continues her studio practice, having shifted from wearable pieces to wall art. She has received continued recognition from experts in the field, including Carol Sauvion, creator of the PBS series Craft in America. In 2015, her large ondulé panel Diptych was acquired by the National Silk Museum of China, following its exhibition in Hangzhou and Foshan, with special gratitude to Yoshiko Wada, who introduced Amy to the region.
Jon Eric Riis
The tapestries of Jon Eric Riis can be found in the permanent collection of The Art Institute of Chicago as well as the American Craft Museum in New York and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Museum of Art, Washington D.C., among others. He is past recipient of many awards and grants including National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Grant and a prestigious Honorary Award at the 10th International Triennial of Tapestry, Lotz Poland, 2001.
Considered by many to be the nation’s leading contemporary tapestry artist, Jon Eric Riis has perhaps more than any other artist taken the ancient craft of hand-woven tapestry to the level of important contemporary fine art. Often imbuing his subject matter with highly critical social and cultural ideas, Riis’ provocative art is as important for its content as it is for its stunning execution and unmatched technical prowess. Jon Eric Riis creates extraordinary works of woven silk and metallic thread with textured undulating surfaces of hand-stitched pearls, coral and glass beads. The meticulous works are supremely crafted, astonishing in visual effect and profound in concept.
Christine Tedesco
Biography
I was born in Anchorage, Alaska in 1959. My parents were in Codorva where my father was the town doctor, and my mother was a nurse. After 2 years, my parents relocated to New Orleans so my dad could go back to school to become an ophthalmologist. From there, we moved to Chico, CA to be closer to my grandmother who lived in the Bay Area. I had a wonderful childhood in CA but when I was 11, we moved to Spartanburg, SC to be closer to relatives on my mother’s side. I have been in SC ever since then having completed my education in architecture at Clemson University. I grew up with a very strong mother who said “do not depend on a man. You need an education in something you can get a job in.” Not bad advice, so I went into architecture. After graduation, I worked in firms in Columbia, SC and at 29 went back to graduate school to get my master’s in architecture. At 40, I opened my own firm doing commercial and institutional work. Last year, at 65, I retired. During my working life I was always making fiber pieces, going to various shows including trade shows and gallery shows to get my work out in the public realm. Since last year, I entered a new phase for me, that being a full-time artist and it has been wonderful. I have the time and studio to make work which brings me great joy.
Artist Statement
“Fabric is and always has been a basic necessity of human life . . . we are wrapped in it at birth, covered in
it in life and shrouded in it in death.”
- Robert Shaw
pattern: 1a. An archetype. B. An ideal worthy of imitation: a pattern of womanly virtues. 2. A plan,
diagram, or model to be followed in making things: dress patterns . . . 5. A composite of traits or features
characteristic of an individual: behavioral patterns.
- American Heritage Dictionary
grid: 1. A framework of parallel or crisscrossed bars. 2. A pattern of horizontal and vertical lines
forming squares on a map, used as a reference for locating points.
- American Heritage Dictionary
I am a woman who was brought up in the south learning the domestic arts of cooking and sewing. I grew
to love the creativity in doing these things: the making of soups and casseroles, pants and shirts, jumpers
and handbags. Later, the study of architecture furthered my visual awareness of things in the built
environment. The act of making or creating anything, whether it is a simple tile pattern, drafting a complex
technical drawing, or making a quilt or garment has always been an artistic endeavor for me.
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to live in Italy for an extended period of time. I began to notice the
beautiful tile work that was everywhere throughout the country. I photographed and did sketches to make
watercolors of these tiles whenever I encountered them, attempting to create a visual library for myself.
This study of tile design, in combination with my education in architectural design has given me a rich
vocabulary for my work in textiles. Using vibrant, iridescent silks, I created dynamic compositions
inspired by the patterns I saw in Italy. I also began to incorporate the gold and jewel tones of mosaics in
Italian and Byzantine churches. I can see this influence emerging after looking at the many churches the
artisans lovingly created.
This study in combination with my architectural design education has resulted in my interest in non-
traditional textile work.
After many years of working only in architecture, I have broadened my practice with my husband, to
include architecture, art and design. Our interests encompass furniture, lighting, products, photography and
textiles. We have exhibited our work at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York
City, local art venues and recently my work has been acquired by the SC State Museum as part of their
permanent collection.
In recent years I have completed several commissions for public spaces (see “Events and Publications” in
my resume). These were designed for specific sites while others were purchased from pieces already
completed.
Currently I am working in cotton on a “cutting series” resulting in 5’ x 5’ compositions using 20” blocks.
I’m adding surface stitching to create texture as well. I continue to experiment with fabrics challenging
traditional quilting always asking why things are done the way they are done.