Kristin Ingrid Hildebrand creates large-scale works combining indigo pigment and raw steel frameworks, investigating what emerges when consciousness is freed from external pressures and commercial imperatives. She comes to this inquiry with unusual authority: two decades at the apex of cultural production as the youngest creative director at Jones Group, leading Nike's Olympics and World Cup initiatives, founding venture-backed luxury brand WONE (carried by Barneys and Net-A-Porter), holding multiple patents, and achieving success in every arena society presented as meaningful.

 

From that position of complete achievement, she chose to walk away—moving to 72 acres of wilderness to access what consciousness does in radical quiet and direct relationship with materials. Working in states of deep receptivity, often using psychedelics as methodology, she collaborates with concentrated indigo pigment (the same substance used to dye denim) as it oxidizes and reveals its own intelligence, and recently began welding raw steel frames she perceives in altered states as the architecture beneath consciousness itself. Her tools are drawn from physical reality—roofing implements, barn tools, deer antlers, fire, welding equipment—transforming hardware-store materials into portals that feel unearthed rather than made.

 

A mother of three raised through unschooling, her practice integrates motherhood, energy work, and wilderness as aspects of the same investigation: what wants to exist when we stop forcing things into prescribed shapes? Her large-scale works (36"×36" to 8'×8' and beyond) explore primordial consciousness, the sacred intelligence of darkness, and the unseen architecture of energy—evidence of what emerges in the space between pre-capitalism and post-capitalism, where materials have their own will and consciousness can exist before the world tells it what to become.