Kristy Bishop is an artist living and working in Charleston, SC. She primarily works in textiles and creates relief sculpture by handweaving, sewing, and dyeing fiber. The types of dyes that she prefers to use are gathered locally or while traveling. Her primary sources include roadside growth, gardens, and grocery stores. This supplies Bishop with onion and avocado skins, eucalyptus, coreopsis, wild fennel, walnut hulls, marigold, annatto seeds and more. Bishop also finds it hard to resist using unusual yarn such as metallic and paper yarns. She mixes these with natural dyed fibers to contrast the synthetic with the organic. Combining these materials, she weaves intuitively on a floor loom.
In the fall of 2015, Bishop participated in a three-month residency at 701 Center for Contemporary Art. During her time there she created work to be shown the following year in a solo exhibiton. She was the 2012-2013 North Charleston Artist in Resident, a recipient of the Dr. Judith Temple Scholarship at Arrowmont School of Crafts, co-recipient of the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant, and received the Best in Show at the 2015 Piccolo Spoleto Juried exhibition at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park. Bishop teaches multiple textile techniques in partnership with the Charleston Museum, The Gibbes
Museum of Art, Engaging Creative Minds, 701 CCA and Enough Pie. Currently she is partnering with Enough Pie, a nonprofit organization in Charleston’s neck area, and teaching workshops at the Vat Shack, an indigo dye studio. Most recently, she is a recipient of the SC Artists Ventures Grant from the SC Arts Commission, Exhibited work at The Southern, in Charleston, and continues to teach as an artist in residence in Charleston and Berkeley County schools through Engaging Creative Minds.
