Fiber Friends

Fiber Friends is a playful exploration of material, color and pattern, heavily influenced by pop art and drawing on symbols from the natural world. The works explore identity through obscuring the wearer’s face, replacing it with boldly colored cartoonish figures of plants and animals. 

Ryan Lytle and Kristin Skees have been real-life Fiber Friends for five years, both developing individual bodies of work using bold color and unconventional fiber processes. Ryan’s felted sculptures reinterpret animal totems as a vehicle for self exploration, and the ecosystems of relationships using animals as personal metaphor.  Kristin’s conceptual photographs of wearable knitted cozies explore personal identity and how it is revealed or constricted through interpersonal relationships and the relationship between artist and viewer. 

Together, this Fiber Friends collaboration melds Ryan and Kristin’s individual working processes and concepts, relishing in their love of color and finding beauty in the absurd.