Kit Eastman

About

Kit Eastman is a textile artist from St. Paul, Minnesota. She creates both functional and art textiles, hand-painted in the Japanese tradition of katazome, or stencil dyeing, using a palette of natural dyes and pigments on linen, silk and paper. Her work celebrates daily meetings with the wild birds, plants, and lake breezes of her local urban surroundings.

Kit’s love of cloth began in childhood with the influence of her dressmaker grandmother. She earned a Studio Arts degree from the University of Minnesota (1980), where she focused on drawing and painting. She worked for many years as an instructional designer/writer of online learning materials, and since early in the millennium has turned her focus back to her textile art.

Statement

My work celebrates daily meetings with the wild birds, plants, and lake breezes of my local urban surroundings, as well as the interior landscape of thoughts, emotions, and imagination. The patterns and cycles I observe in plants, bodies of water, birds and seasons draw me in. I work with these motifs, exploring the play of repeated imagery and multiple layers in a single piece and/or among several pieces.

My work develops through several cycles of adding color to fabric, using hand cut stencils and various dyeing, painting and printing methods. I sometimes add simple stitching. There are always periods of waiting due to the requirements of the materials, and this rhythm draws me deeper into the work. I find myself contemplating the idea of time, as measured in natural cycles, including my own experience.

Since early 2009 I have been working exclusively with the materials and techniques of the Japanese textile tradition called katazome, or stencil dyeing. This centuries-old process incorporates elements of both printmaking and painting, and relies on simple materials such as rice paste resist, natural pigments and soymilk. The processes, gestures, tools and materials of katazome inspire me almost as much as my subject matter!