Rough Sketches: Featured Artist: Kiki Smith

In my 107 class, we watched a video about Kiki Smith, which I found quite fascinating. Kiki Smith is known as a leading figure among artists addressing the philosophical, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature. Her work uses different mediums such as sculpture, printmaking, installation, and drawing to touch on a variety of subjects from the human body and domesticity to classical mythology and folk stories. Themes of life, death, and resurrection are common in much of her work, and she pays particular attention to the female form, portraying it with honesty and vulnerability.

Much of Smith’s work gives particular attention to portraying the human body, examining the dichotomy between our psychological and physical sides. “I think I chose it as a subject because it is the one form that we all share,” she says. “It’s something that everybody has their own authentic experience with.”

Theology of the Body@Sacramentality

Virgin Mary, Wax, cheesecloth and wood, 1993

Smith’s work has also long focused female artists and feminist issues. "In the mid-nineties, she began to engage with themes from literature, history, and folklore, reinterpreting biblical and mythological women as inhabitants of resolutely physical bodies. More recently, her vocabulary has expanded to include animals, the cosmos, and the natural world: 'My work has evolved from minute particles within the body, up through the body, and landed outside the body. Now I want to roam around the landscape.' In pieces that merge human and animal, she creates new mythologies, finding in the mortality that has pervaded so much of her process the possibility of rebirth. In her art, Smith has staged a persistent inquiry that has resulted in works of uncommon power and beauty, inviting us to reexamine ourselves, our history, and our place in the world" (Walkerart.org).

Born, Bronze, 2002

Rapture, 2001

Death is another common theme in many of Smith's works.

Hanging Woman, 1992

Untitled, 1988

Kiki Smith, <span class="wac_title">Getting the Bird Out</span>

Getting the Bird Out, Bronze and string head, 1992

One of the interesting collections she talked about on the video was her work on witches. "I just got interested in thinking about witch representations; then I thought it would be nice to make a commemorative statute, for the witch burnings in Europe. I was trying to think about public art. Then I thought I would just make the public art that I would like to have. I thought to make these women on pyres. Probably also from just having a fireplace and looking at chopped wood."