Where the threads lead: The textiles of Kristie Arias

Peruvian textile artist Kristie Arias’s friend Marcella Echavarría follows the latest twists in Arias’s design inspirations

In Barranco, Lima’s old seaside neighbourhood, Kristie Arias works from one of those beautiful old houses with high ceilings and generous rooms, where the particular light of Lima seems to linger. Her atelier is full of fibre, yarn, fragments, colour and experiments in different states of becoming. Some are recognisably textiles. Others are beginning to escape that definition altogether.

I have known Kristie for close to twenty years. Over that time, I have watched her research, experiment, teach, collaborate and persist. I have seen the extraordinary dedication behind her work and a career that has moved fluidly between art, design, fashion, museums, artisanship and industry.

So visiting her atelier while I am in Peru feels less like discovering her work than encountering the latest chapter of a conversation I have been privileged to witness for two decades.

And something is shifting. I have the feeling Kristie is becoming increasingly fascinated by geology: strata, sediment, erosion, the way landscapes record time.

The textile is also changing. It is leaving the wall, acquiring volume, weight and shadow. Fibre accumulates and protrudes. Weaving begins to behave like sculpture.

Perhaps this was always where the thread was leading. Kristie began close to the handmade, working with the Peruvian artisanal textile company Wayra before co-founding KLAUD, one of Peru’s early ventures devoted to contemporary textile development. There she helped create La República del Tejido, an innovative production chain centred on hand spinning.

Later came roles at ESCVDO, MATE and the Museo Textil Precolombino Amano, alongside her artistic practice, research and teaching.What I have witnessed throughout those years is curiosity without restlessness for its own sake. Kristie goes deep. She learns a material, a technique, a history. She understands the people behind it. Then she asks what else it might become.

Today, those years of enquiry seem to be coming full circle. She is exploring what happens when artisanal intelligence meets industrial possibility, allowing the precision and scale of contemporary production to enter into conversation with the irregularity and humanity of the hand.

Her recent project for the Peruvian airline LATAM at Lima’s new international airport makes that evolution tangible. Kristie developed textile designs for the VIP lounges, including the Signature and Premium spaces. There is something beautiful about that juxtaposition: one of humanity’s oldest technologies entering an airport, an architecture devoted to speed, systems and movement. The hand meets the machine, yet neither disappears.

And then there is the earth. Long before my recent visit, geology was already surfacing in Kristie’s vocabulary. In ‘Paisaje Nodal’, presented at the Museo Amano in 2019, she created woven works resembling sections cut through the ground. Layers of fibre became geological strata, coloured with references to cochineal, indigo and the ochres of Peruvian textile traditions.

Cultural memory and geological memory seemed to accumulate through the same process: layer upon layer, time held inside matter. Today, those works feel almost prophetic. The landscape is becoming increasingly physical. Her textiles want to occupy space.

This exploration is deeply connected to Peru, where textile has carried knowledge for millennia. Kristie has long been interested in the quipu, the Andean system of knotted cords used to record and organise information. It offers an extraordinary premise for a contemporary artist: textile as a form of thought, fibre as an archive.

Perhaps this is why, after twenty years of knowing Kristie, I find this moment particularly exciting. We often speak about preserving artisanal traditions as though their value depended on keeping them unchanged. Living traditions have always evolved. They survive through curiosity, exchange and invention.

Kristie’s career embodies that movement. She has travelled from the artisanal to the industrial and back again, carrying knowledge from each world into the next.

Now the boundaries are dissolving. Art, craft and design overlap; textile becomes sculpture; landscape becomes material; technology meets the hand. Twenty years later, the thread is still there-Kristie is simply following it further.

Words by Marcella Echavarría