Kristy Darnell Battani creates abstract, textile-inspired contemporary art built from the pages of vintage print materials. Drawn to manuals, textbooks and maps, Kristy weaves pieces of those materials into abstract narratives designed to draw viewers into new conversations with the materials and the ideas they represent. “The materials that most interest me are so mundane that people rarely keep them, let alone consider them worthy of including in fine art. They are the materials we have used for guidance, record-keeping, notes and ideas. The very best ones are dog-eared, highlighted or filled with personal notations, in other words, they reflect the humanness of a prior life.” Kristy begins each piece by deconstructing a single source material so that she no longer sees it in the form it was originally presented. She looks for repeating forms, images, colors and ideas that will form the basis of the artwork. For Kristy, the process of building the layers of the artwork is less an act of collage as a re-weaving of the original source material in a form that allows the viewer to interact with the ideas contained in those materials in a new way. In addition to her abstract work, Kristy uses a similar process to create a series of abstract portraits of women who were leaders in their fields but who remain relatively unknown. “Society typically fixates on women’s physical appearance. In contrast, the key concern of these works for me is building the figures from thought-provoking source materials that reflect the contributions these women made to their respective fields.” Kristy lives and works in Austin, Texas. Her work is included in numerous corporate, hospitality, university and private collections.