Bio
Kyle Reynolds is a biologist, humanist, and self-taught sculptor born in New York, residing currently in Seattle. Her ceramic and mixed media sculptures evoke contemporary allegorical fables portrayed with the delicacy of a watercolor illustration.
Kyle earned her BS in Biology at the University of South Florida and her MS in Marine Ecology researching evolution of deep-sea organisms at California State University, Monterey Bay. This marked a culmination of a lifelong interest in extreme adaptations, a topic she pursued through the fields of genetics (Johns Hopkins University), reproductive biology, ecology, and environmental science (Moss Landing Marine Labs). Refugee advocacy work through her grassroots arts nonprofit (The Art of Saving Humanity) provided her a more human lens on the topic of extreme adaptations, and stoked a compulsion to speak truth to power through her art.
After a shift in 2020, Kyle turned fulltime to her studio, honing her skills in clay sculpture. Her oeuvre of sculptural works maintains her focus on extreme adaptations, only now through a cultural lens, often observing the evolution of humanity’s responses to extreme shifts or imbalances in power. Her work has been acquired in private collections and has been juried into multiple group exhibitions at the Confluence Gallery in Twisp, Washington, Art at the Cave in Vancouver, Washington, and three consecutive Edmonds Arts Festivals (2022-'24) in Edmonds, Washington where she received the Pamela Mummy Award for sculpture and an Honorable Mention for Best Sculpture. She was a recipient of multiple 4Culture grants in 2018 for her arts nonprofit as well as the 2024 Cultural Producer Grant, and has been awarded a 2025 Art & Science Residency at PLAYA Summer Lake.
Background
I was running a non-profit for refugee artists out of my home when a generous ceramics artist gifted her entire studio’s worth of tools, equipment and over 300 pounds of clay to the cause. The year was 2018, and despite a lifelong love of art, I had no experience with clay. I was fortunate to be invited by a local group of Native American elders to lead some art workshops. Together we learned to make ceramic beads and charms, firing the works in our donated kiln and bestowing the necklaces we made to tribal veterans as tokens of appreciation. Manifesting actual physical objects of great meaning from lumps of earth sparked a love of the material and art form that has grown in intensity every day since.
My science background colors my experimental techniques. I often mix diluted oxides and underglazes before low-firing, then add multiple thin layers of watercolor, gouache, or powdered pigment with a binding agent. The non-vitrified ceramic surface wicks the colors inside, building them up layer by layer to provide a soft, dreamy effect. This finish, in combination with the often heavy subject matter results in an almost Grimm's Fairytale-esque effect; stories that played a prominent role in my childhood and became the language through which I tend to process difficult topics.
