Kiki Smith

KS: In general, I do what I’m told. By that I mean, something tells me what to do, and I follow it. You don’t really know where it’s going at first. You start moving, and over time, it reveals how it wants to be. I always have a kind of knee-jerk reaction to doing something. Either I see something, or I’m rehashing something I did twenty years ago. I’m mostly doing that, working with things I made in the nineties and turning them over, finding something new each time.

With the physical process of making things, like the work in my current show, I made these birds, and I could see exactly where they came from in my earlier work and how I was using them. Then I cast them in bronze and left all the noise from the casting on the surface. Normally, I think that’s a cheap trick. When artists first work in foundries, they get seduced by all the gating, venting, and scaffolding, and it can look very gratuitous.

I have preferences. I’m very interested in printmaking, and about ninety percent of what I do relates to it in some way. The physical process fascinates me. What comes into it, though, is up for grabs. How it all plays out takes time, and sometimes time itself reveals what things mean.

I don’t stray far from where my work already lives. It stays in its own canal. I don’t have a specific agenda. When I was younger, certain ways of working and certain materials were dismissed, and so were certain people. A lot of things weren’t treated equally. It didn’t seem fair to me. There were things I liked and wanted to work with, and I didn’t want to be blocked by cultural or historical rules about what was valued.

I pushed through that, but the art world is much larger now than it was in the 1980s or 90s. I used to make quilts, stitch drawings, and tie-dyed paintings. I’d say, “I can wash and fold them like a housewife,” and I could see people glaze over with contempt and want to leave. I suppose I liked being obnoxious because I didn’t want to be stopped. Now, everything is so broad that those conflicts hardly register anymore. I also used to say that as a woman you’re marginalized. Then one day I woke up and thought, that’s not really true, at least not in the way I meant it.

If you’re marginalized, you carry a lot of energy because you’re being kept out of something. You may not even want what’s inside, but you feel the possibility is stronger than what’s being offered to you. After a while, you realize that’s not always what’s happening anymore.

For me, a lot of my work was about growing up as a person, standing in myself. As you get older, you get used to yourself. Things that felt overwhelming when you were young settle down. That part of life passes. You wear yourself into a kind of comfort. Not some defined identity, just familiarity with being you. Then you don’t have to be so self-conscious. You have years behind you. You trust yourself. I’ve always said I trust my artwork, even when I’m embarrassed by it. Sometimes I wished pieces would disappear or break. I used to have fantasies about a storage space burning down. But it’s not that important. What matters is your experience, whether the work gets close to something that feels honest at that moment. It doesn’t have to be explicit.

That’s what I admire in artists and in anyone who takes risks in any field: having some inner compass that accepts that you don’t know where you’re going, and moving anyway.

KS:  I don’t think it’s a specific thing. It’s not like I’m trying to elicit something very precise. It’s more about whether it feels okay.

To be annoying, I always say it’s like moving dollhouse furniture around, to annoy people, to suggest that art shows are like making dollhouse arrangements. When I moved to where I live now, I spent a year or two moving things in very small increments. I’d take something and move it six inches and think, “Oh, that’s good. Now the world is whole and safe again.”

I like installing shows and making arrangements of things because it’s like an alphabet, putting materials together, one thing with another, one feeling with another. It’s like building sentences. I used to be really bad at sentence diagrams in school, probably because I put words in the wrong order for some reason. I like the idea of building these trains of information, these conglomerations. There’s something deeply pleasurable about ordering information. But it has to include incongruity, or at least space, so it doesn’t become propaganda for something. It needs room to be a feeling. It’s also about how much time and energy you have and what comes out of that. It’s not anything in particular.

I also always tell students the worst thing you can have is good taste. Artists think they have some aesthetic, and that can become a trap. I fall into it all the time when I’m making tiny arrangements in my house. That’s part of what makes putting things together complicated.

The shows I make in New York usually involve creating a group or a presentation of work. This one isn’t exactly that, because it includes old works and new ones, but it still feels right.

A lot of times, people ask you to make a show, like in Malmö, where they wanted tapestries. I told them I’d already made a tapestry show and couldn’t just do that again. I often want to make things more didactic, to show all the offshoots, because the tapestries are just one moment in a larger spinning of images, interacting, braiding, weaving together.

I like that, too. I like being didactic. But sometimes they say, we don’t want to show the sketches, even though that’s what interests me. I want to show how, from one image I made at Harvard in 1994, probably everything I’ve made since came from the Peabody Museum then, hundreds of works came out of it, each just slightly turning that image, giving it another life.

That’s how a lot of things work for me. You make something, then shift it into another material or scale, and it changes. For me, I can’t handle too much life. I like it when things only have a little.

KS:  It wasn’t on purpose. As a teenager, I became interested in quilt-making, and that fascinated me. I knitted and crocheted a lot. But I never thought about making tapestries, because traditional tapestries are woven by hand, and it was unfathomable to me to spend that much time making one thing. So I made stitch drawings instead, really big ones.

I think I first saw the Bayeux Tapestry in a book, in photographs. They’re really stitched drawings of a long procession of armies moving. There’s something similar in printmaking, too, processional prints of courts and soldiers. I’ve always liked long narrative sequences and the idea of procession, the sense of moving through images. Like film, you’re sitting still, but something moves past you. Then I saw pictures of the apocalyptic tapestries. I must have been about 32, in the early 1980s. My sister lived in Paris, so I asked my mother, and she and I went there. We went shopping, but we also went to see them. They’re still one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life.

The apocalypse as an idea is complicated. It’s not a very healthy idea, but the tapestries were made in the 1300s, and they’re insanely rich and fanciful. The apocalypse itself is very fanciful. They also have a very limited palette, and they’re huge, each section is about 20-feet long. There were once about ninety of them; now there are maybe seventy. At one point, they were used as horse blankets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Later, the French reclaimed them, and they ended up where they hang now. They’re incredible to me. The apocalypse is also something that looms inside me, probably more than I’d like. When I was younger, I used to say we live on the “murder planet,” that the level of violence here is overwhelming and impossible to comprehend.

I went to a talk about the apocalyptic tapestries a couple of weeks ago because there was a conference about them. I was thinking that most artists aren’t that involved with them. I mentioned this song, “Trials, Troubles, Tribulations,” by E.C. Ball, I think; It’s from the late 1950s. I played it at the entrance and joked that I didn’t think the French had as much apocalyptic pop-culture as we do. Our music is full of it: folk, gospel, shape-note singing, even death metal. It’s all soaked in apocalypse. That comes from how religious America has always been, with so many different belief systems. It’s in us. It’s always there, like a shadow behind us. And of course, it shows up now in national politics.

Artists are like vampires. Any new technology, or any revival of old technology, they want to absorb it. It has to fit into whatever strange landscape is already in your head. I used to sew a lot, but when my eyesight started going in my forties, I stopped. I loved it. But artists are different, some people are content doing one thing, and others want as many material experiences as possible. Materials give you a lot. They come with histories and limits and culture built in.

It’s hard to treat material as “just material.” Blue is never just blue, it carries thousands of years of use. Painters really feel that weight of history. Maybe sculpture does a little less, because you can relate to everyday things like washing machines. Sometimes people offer you projects from the outside. Most of the time, I don’t know what to do with them. Someone once asked me to make stage sets. I did it, and it taught me about scale, but it also felt beside the point. It didn’t bring me closer to myself. Still, nothing I’ve done ever hurt me. Sometimes people ask for something big, then they change their minds. In the end, it doesn’t matter. You learn something anyway.

I do think it’s important to stay close to yourself, whatever that means. I like making T-shirts and scarves. That’s how I started, the first things I sold were scarves and shirts. I had a few operations going. Anything can become interesting, a table, a door, a light switch. Everything connects to everything eventually. What lasts is the thing that holds meaning for you over time. A lot of it comes from childhood, a snow globe kind of object that stays with you forever.

I met an artist in Germany when I was young, about ten years older than me. He said your work can’t be so personal that no one can enter it, but it can’t be so generic that nothing of you is at stake. It needs enough heat in it that other people can bring themselves to it. You don’t want people to see what you “think.” You want them to have space to feel. The work has to come from something real in you, intellectually, emotionally, however you’re built. Artists can go in any direction. You see what people care about, and it changes. Sometimes it falls apart. But that movement is part of it.

KS: I don’t know. I always say my favorite thing about being alive is light, and the second is maybe the moon. The best thing about being on Earth is seeing the moon. I don’t know why. As a kid, I looked at it a lot.

The moon is magical and mysterious to me. A friend once told me a Zen thing, I didn’t really understand it at the time, but he said the moon is smaller than the earth and very far away. I love thinking about that. I also think about, again, the apocalypse. The moon refuses to shine. A few years ago, I thought, I’ve been painting the moon forever, making prints and maps of it. Then there’s the blood moon. When people say that, I think it’s reflecting the blood on earth. The moon has a billion meanings. We put so many things on it.

Moons and birds appear the most in my work. They’re just things that stay with me, that get their hooks in. And they change.

KS:  The first bird sculpture I made was a crow. I’d just come back from Germany, and when I landed, I heard that 23 or 26 crows had fallen from the sky in New Jersey. They didn’t know why. Maybe toxins in the air. Animals seem to self-destruct sometimes. Whales beach themselves for reasons people don’t fully understand. Caribou will run off cliffs. 

With the crows, I thought it might be poisoning. It happened in New Jersey, where I’m from, and I felt like I had to make a memorial. I tried to write to the state to see if I could visit them, but nobody responded. So I made a crow body, then separated wings, then feet, and I kept rearranging them. I liked being able to animate them the way I do with drawings, making the same thing again and again, but giving each one a slightly different life.

Later, I made lots of owls and eagles. When I went to the Mattress Factory residency in Pittsburgh, I also went to Carnegie. At the time, they loaned out bird specimens. I got on a plane with a tray full of dead birds. It’s illegal to have certain birds, or any birds, really.

I made drawings called Destruction of Birds. I made prints, first etchings, then a Xerox book. Then I made rubber stamps from them, molds from the stamps, and made long rows of birds, over and over.

When you look in museum drawers, it’s row after row after row. I used to go to the natural history museum, and it’s all formaldehyde. After two minutes, your eyes are watering. But visually it’s intense: blue, then green, then yellow, then red. So that’s how I made the work, rows and rows of dead birds. That’s what it felt like was happening.

KS: I was asked to be in a show in Germany called Conta Park. There were about five artists, and they gave us serious funding, very different from the U.S. I had enough money to make a large installation of Red Riding Hoods and wolves. It was the early-to-mid 1990s, when artists were expected to go into cities and “fix” things. The town I was working in was falling apart after the industrial era. People were leaving. They asked what artists could contribute. Honestly, it’s not my business whether towns survive. Towns come and go. They always have. It’s history. I’m not here to preserve a place in some sentimental way.

Then someone showed me a Gustave Doré illustration of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, and the first thing I noticed was that they were the same size. That stayed with me.

I thought: this place could go back to nature, brambles everywhere, or it could have a future. That future could be girls, which no one in society really pays attention to, or it could be wolves, which people are frightened of.

Then I realized: they’re the same thing. Both are outside. Both are unwanted. Both are feared. So I made them as a procession, moving together. I made it in glass and also as a book. It wrapped around a building on three sides. Later, it went to Switzerland somewhere. I never saw it again. Around that time, I’d stopped making figures. After being at Harvard, with so much going on in figuration, I felt like I could let it go. I wanted to focus on nature. But fairy tales pulled me back. They’re full of animal-human relationships. For a while, I worked through that. Then I stopped. It just ended. I’d never planned to work with Little Red Riding Hood. I didn’t think about who lived or died. It was a chance. I just saw that drawing, and what struck me was the scale. That’s all it took.

You can spend ten years on one small thing that gets into your head by accident. So yes, I made a lot about Red Riding Hood for a while. I even made scarves with braids because I like making multiples. Your brain spins things out. Then it pulls them back in like a storm. Things fly around and suddenly come together. That’s what a brain can do.