Kristin’s studio name, oon, is a phonetic reference to the French article ‘une’ denoting the singular and feminine in the French language, which feels appropriate for this solo endeavor. 

Working out of her basement studio in Shaker Heights, Ohio, she compares her creative mindset to that of an explorer. “In this world where most everything has been explored & google has all the answers, maybe the best thing you can do is explore your own self. That’s where all the newness is.”

She wanders around in her head, pulling bits and pieces from her life, like pulling reference books off the shelf and then pours the chosen ideas through various filters, exhausting options, problem solving, and imposing boundaries until something lands. “Ultimately, it’s the culmination of myself at this moment, distilled down into object. It sounds intellectual, but it’s not. It’s quite simply my search for an intuitive ‘it’.”

That intuitive ‘it’ finds its form across a myriad of mediums but paper, clay, plaster, and charcoal are staples she returns to again and again. She finds inspiration from seemingly ordinary moments with her son, the thrill of ‘a find’ while vintage treasure hunting, the reuse or repurposing of old materials, and her own mistakes which continually propel her forward and often serve as a jumping off point for new work. 

Kristin graduated from The University of Chicago in 2009 with a Master’s in Cognitive Psychology and is now an artist.