Studio Kitis

Studio Kitis sprang from the heart of the earth, a whispered seed that unfurled into being. What began as a quiet devotion to plants grew into a love that unfurls, spilling magic back into the earth.

This creative studio is based in New Providence, The Bahamas, and works to leave our spaces better than we found them. The three main pillars of this studio are Paper Arts, Planting Design/Garden Installation, and Fine Arts. The foundation of these pillars is nature itself. The fibers, dyes, and construction materials used in the paper studio are all from the garden. The plants show us how they want to live, and we put them in places where they thrive while also complementing our growing building infrastructure. Sometimes the imagination strikes and we need to put a brush to canvas and bring something magical to life. This studio is a product of letting the threads of life flow through you and not around you.

Highlights from the Studio bookshelf….

Ex Libris
Books for a Butterfly
Books for a Butterfly

The Butterfly’s Book fell from the skies and landed in the lush spring meadows. They mark a stunning collaboration of Kitis’s and Josefine’s studios, blending the magic of book binding and cyanotype. If this book was a girl, her name would be Dahlia, born under the spring sun, in a basket full of the garden’s harvests.

A Painter’s Book
A Painter’s Book

This book was made to capture the whimsy ideas of my friend, Avery Houlshouser. She’s a painter that bursts through the rules to depict the feminine in all its layers. This books not only captures her colourful presence, but the pages inside hope to inspire and add to her creative processes whenever they come. I believe every artist needs an artist book that reflects themselves, pages that were made just for them and their imagination.

A book for a Poet
A book for a Poet

This volume was envisioned specifically for a poet who longs for love, crafted to hold the weight of verses dedicated to that endless pursuit. The deep brown pages carry a sense of antiquity that makes the book feel like a relic pulled from an old-world library. Dressed in vintage lace and adorned with garden-grown botanicals that bleed erratic, emotional pools of crimson and deep indigo, it is a tactile piece designed to look and feel like old money. Each page stands ready to absorb a love that is as beautiful, unpredictable, and haunting as the chemistry trapped within its fibers.

I’m Brandon Halkitis, but here I go by Kitis. I am a multimedia artist and designer from The Bahamas. When I'm not outside frolicking and foraging in my garden, I'm either helping others understand the world of plants through landscape design or finding fun ways to express myself. My expression comes in all forms; most of my life it has been through oil painting, but recently it has landed in botanical arts. I've just fallen in love with the things our plant friends can do, like creating a deep red dye from the Hibiscus sabdariffa or the strongest sheet of paper from the Hibiscus tiliaceus. As of late, the process of creating paper from plants to then use them with natural dyes and other mediums of art has been so fulfilling. Once you have written on a page that tells the story of the plants it was made from, you'll never want to write on a white sheet of printer paper ever again.

Our plants can do more than be turned into useful resources; they also heal and mend. We have a natural affinity to plants because we’ve been evolving with them since the beginning of our human existence. At some point in our human journey, we started losing our connection to the land for the sake of survival. When we remove the ecosystem around us for our own benefit, we lose the magic that pulses through its soils. Physically, a plethora of wild fauna now have to look for a new home, and mentally, we forget that they even existed. As a landscape designer, it's not just my goal to provide plants, but to create a home for our non-human friends in our growing cities and neighborhoods. Every plant has its community that thrives around it, and I aim to understand every last one of them so we can both have a place to call home. If you’d like to see one scenario where this thinking can be applied—I did a study on our Modern Cemeteries, using a cemetery in Seattle, Washington as the guinea pig for a plan that re-wilds us all

A few designs and research topics for the Landscape….

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Landscape Design

My palette is from the garden, and it is my studio and home. It is where I explore my creativity—where ideas are born and inspiration strikes. Whether it be the stems used for paper fiber, leaves for collaging, or roots and flowers for dyeing, our plants are just waiting for us to unlock the magic that is pulsing through their fibers.

To me, the garden is a reflection of the gardener. Is it wild? Manicured? Is it populated with sculptures or completely mowed over? The garden can give a lot of insight into the type of people who exist around it. I like my gardens a bit wild, with lots of variety. Who knows which bug will choose to visit my garden, and I could only hope I have something to offer him as he crawls by. My garden isn't only for myself; the birds are welcome to eat my fruit, and the lizards can hang for as long as they like. This is the kind of mentality we should be adopting when we decide to steward a piece of land. The joy that fills my body when a hummingbird drinks from a flower of a bush I planted is overwhelming because that's what life is about!

  • Journey From Afar

  • Who is he?

  • The Sun and Moon Prince

  • The Orange