Cassia Kite
Willa Cather Childhood Home, Soundstitching, 2020
Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, Soundstitching, 2022
Up on Kite Cemetery Hill, Soundstitching, 2018
Intimidator Rose, 2019
Moonstone Rose, 2019
South Side of Kite House, Soundstitching, 2015
The Kite House, Young Howard on the East Lawn c.1910, 2019
Cassia Kite is an interdisciplinary artist. She created soundstitching, a multimedia project that transforms colour from a hand-stitched image into a musical composition that can be interpreted by a musician and/or a performance artist. The result is a combination of three forms of art in one collaborative, multisensory experience.
Kite has collaboratively produced large-scale work for chamber ensemble and dancers using colour-coded graphic scores derived from her hand-stitched tapestries. Her work was premiered at the KANEKO in Omaha, Nebraska in July 2017. She has been featured as an experimental composer and visual artist at music festivals and in museums and universities. Kite was awarded artist-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in 2018, and The Hambidge Creative Residency Program in 2019. She is the recipient of the Paul J. Smith Excellence in Fibers Award from the Fiber Art Network 2018, the Dixon Ticonderoga Award of Excellence from the Florida Art Education Association in 2019, Sarasota Art Educators Association Award from the Florida Art Education Association in 2021, and the Ringling College of Art and Design Award in 2022.
Kite produced a series of soundstitchings inspired by Willa Cather's life and work, which form part of a permanent exhibition at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska.
Kite's soundstitching of Cather's childhood home features in Issue 339 of Resurgence & Ecologist (July/August 2023). You can read the article here