Through Fiber and Form: HOTTEA
A material as simple as yarn can reshape how people experience a place. For artist Eric Rieger, known as HOTTEA, that transformation takes form through large-scale installations that turn everyday materials into shared, public experiences. As part of the Racine Art Museum’s (RAM) In/Between festival, his work highlights how contemporary craft can move beyond objects to transform the environments we inhabit.
Based in Minneapolis, Rieger began his career in graffiti and street art, working in public space and thinking about how art meets people where they are. Over time, he shifted his focus to fiber, drawing on techniques he learned from his grandmother. What started as a simple material choice has become the foundation of an international practice, with installations spanning bridges, building facades, and open landscapes.
Weaving is central to Rieger’s work, both as a method and a way of thinking. Using yarn and other flexible materials, he creates large, suspended compositions that stretch across space in lines, grids, and color gradients. These works are not meant to be viewed from a single point. Instead, they unfold as people move through them, with perspective, light, and weather all playing a role in how they are experienced.
At In/Between, he will build on his established yarn-based technique. Using strands of color stretched and layered in space, his work draws from weaving while remaining distinctly sculptural. The yarn creates a sense of movement and depth, shifting as viewers walk through or around it. In this way, the installation emphasizes experience over object, inviting visitors to become active participants rather than passive observers.
This approach aligns closely with the festival’s focus on contemporary craft. Rather than treating craft as a fixed category, In/Between presents it as a flexible way of working—one that connects material, process, and place. Rieger’s installations do exactly that, expanding a familiar material into immersive environments that feel both immediate and accessible.
His work also speaks to the festival’s broader goal of reimagining familiar spaces. Installed outdoors or in shared public settings, these projects invite people to notice their surroundings differently—revealing unexpected patterns, movement, and color within places they may pass through every day.
There is also a strong sense of timing in Rieger’s installations. Because they are temporary and often exposed to the elements, they change over the course of the day and over the life of the project. Light, wind, and shifting perspectives continually alter the work, adding a layer of immediacy and encouraging people to experience it in the moment rather than as something permanent or fixed.
Through its scale, material choices, and openness to participation, Rieger’s work reflects what In/Between is designed to do. It changes how people see a place, highlights the possibilities of contemporary craft, and creates a moment that exists only while the work is there. In Racine, his installation will not only transform a site—it will offer a new way of seeing how simple materials, thoughtfully used, can shape how we move through and relate to the spaces around us.