Wyatt Layton | Oct. 27, 2026
A handmade dress hangs as part as Kristine Hunter’s installation “Past Tattering… A Witnessing at her solo show “Spaces Between: A Witnessing” at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. on Oct. 22. 2026. (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
Performance artist Kristine Hunter opened her show on Thursday, Oct. 22 at the Elizabeth Holden Gallery on Warren Wilson College (WWC) campus, showing videos of her work on the walls, which she urged viewers to witness.
In one, she is pulling a seemingly endless stream of red thread and beads out of her mouth. In another, she’s walking the salt flats of Spain, growing salt crystals on her skin. Not far from each projection is a hand-sewn or beaded dress; the dresses Hunter wore throughout each performance. Hunter’s show, “Spaces Between… a witnessing,” is a testimony – inviting the audience to fall into those “spaces between” performance art and a ‘traditional’ gallery show.
Kristine Hunter’s video installation “Past Tattering… A Witnessing at her solo show “Spaces Between: A Witnessing” at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. on Oct. 22. 2026. (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
“Performance work is ephemeral,” Hunter said. It is at that moment, only at that moment and it is through my body. I experience it, and I'm asking for those to witness… I find that using the term witnessing is interesting because you, as a viewer, at a performance, are witnessing a physical change. You are witnessing a moment in time that will no longer exist.”
Kristine Hunter’s video installation “Past Tattering… A Witnessing at her solo show “Spaces Between: A Witnessing” at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. on Oct. 22. 2026. (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
In her artist statement posted in the gallery, she notes an early fascination with the “visible and hidden layers of the body,” and explains how her work explores topics like “identity, memory, belonging and the continual process of constructing and deconstructing the self,” and explains how her work “considers the body as [an] archive, vessel, landscape, and site of continual becoming.”
A handmade dress with red beads by Kristine Hunter’s in her installation “Past Tattering… A Witnessing at her solo show “Spaces Between: A Witnessing” at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. on Oct. 22. 2026. (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
Ella Gand Seidita, a junior on the Holden Arts Crew, specifically enjoyed the way Hunter talked about her work and the way that it grows and changes over time, and she loved the tone of her pieces.
“I was deeply moved by how passionately she talked about how her work has changed her and [how it] continues to evolve and grow,” Gand Seidita said. “It felt very sincere and beautiful to see someone humanize her work and see it as an inseparable part of her… Her photography work really stuck with me. I felt like a child navigating something that felt barren but also familiar. It felt like revisiting something I've always loved and trying to remember again, because it was so hollow and so empty, but each detail was so heightened, like I should know every inch of the place.”
Kristine Hunter’s video installation “Past Tattering… A Witnessing at her solo show “Spaces Between: A Witnessing” at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. on Oct. 22. 2026. (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
Hunter, who currently serves as Art Faculty and Fine Arts Coordinator at Bay College in Escanaba, Mich., has long found creative ways to weave together her art practices. Though now an interdisciplinary artist, she once found herself torn between her first two mediums – sculpture and photography. From this dilemma sprang the beginning of the next chapter of Hunter’s practice.
“I took the back seat out and took the back door off of a car,” Hunter said. “ Then I brought those back to the studio, and I welded a shoulder to keep the door and the seat together…I shot Super 8 [film] out of the car window, digitized that, then projected it onto the sandblasted car window. People sat in the back seat and the light from the projector dappled on [them], like sunlight, as [they] could sit there and watch the wires go by…That's when I was like: this is it, this is where I'm going. This is everything – the sound, the light, the texture. It was magic.”
Kristine Hunter’s video installation “Past Tattering… A Witnessing at her solo show “Spaces Between: A Witnessing” at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. on Oct. 22. 2026. (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
Hunter’s work has only evolved and grown since that original step into interdisciplinary work, and focuses heavily on process. One of her featured performance pieces in this gallery show is “The Source,” which came to her in a dream: a visual of a cave, then a low body of water reflecting light. In this work, Hunter travelled through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Spain, collecting differing sizes of jars of water and “investigating the history of salt.” She gathered water from and swam bodies of water including the Nile River, the Red Sea, the Bosphorus Strait, the Pink Lake of Torrevieja and ended in the Salinas Grandes salt flat in Argentina. When she arrived at the salt flats, Hunter poured the collected waters over her body and dress, and grew salt crystals on the surface of her skin and clothing.
Kristine Hunter’s video installation “The Source, Work in Progress” at her solo show “Spaces Between: A Witnessing” at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. on Oct. 22. 2026. (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
In another piece, “Past Tattering,” red thread is hanging from the ceiling and walls and a dress sewn with translucent red beads stands on a dress form in front. A video plays alongside of Hunter wearing the dress, pulling seemingly endless red thread with translucent red beads out of her mouth. Hunter places these artifacts next to the video of the performance to serve as a witness and participant in the piece. To her, the dresses play a special role.
Part of Kristine Hunter’s installation “Past Tattering… A Witnessing at her solo show “Spaces Between: A Witnessing” at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. on Oct. 22. 2026. (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
“I'm opening up that place between performance and gallery to share artifacts, photos and video with the viewers,” Hunter said. “Most of the performance pieces have a dress that I hand-sewed or did some machine sewing or beading to. They're a witness to the performance, because you can see time in them. You see the salt on “The Source,” on “The Flow of My Heart” you can see the dirt and moss from carrying the 300 stones, and in “Ode to Ashes,” you can see some of the beading is torn from the branches. They're the spaces between the performance itself and you, the viewer, and I invite you to witness it.”
Warren Wilson College student August Bass and artist Kristine Hunter discuss “Spaces Between: A Witnessing” at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. on Oct. 22. 2026. (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
To get a closer look at all of these pieces and more, visit Kristine Hunter’s gallery, “Spaces Between… a witnessing,” in the Elizabeth Holden Gallery on campus from Oct. 22, 2026 through Dec. 5, 2026.