Kiki Smith

Interview by Zoë Irvine

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 4, 1995

Transcript

During the Spring of 1995, Kiki Smith exhibited concurrently at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and at Anthony d’Offay. This conversation takes place at Anthony d’Offay, where Smith begins by talking about the work on show there, heads and arms combined with other forms such as mushrooms and butterflies.

Zoë Irvine: Can you tell me a bit about the bronze heads here?

Kiki Smith: These pieces all come from one night I had a dream that I had to get the bird out and that I had to make a sculpture of my head with like a bird coming out on a string, a dead bird. That was about three or four years ago and at the same time I started making sculptures just of arms and so they are both a secret series of things that go off in different directions. The heads are all casts of my head but shrunken half size and sort of mushed around a little bit because the nose has got too skinny looking. And then one has a tongue which wobbles back and forth which is like rocking dolls from the 19th century because I wanted to make kind of kinetic sculptures. One is with mushrooms and the other one downstairs is with a butterfly, kissing a butterfly. That is maybe the second one after ‘getting the bird out’. In some way they are about mouth emissions or something, things coming out of your mouth or going into your mouth. I guess they are some kind of symbols for soul or spirits coming in and out of you. Probably for me they fit into some version to me like that and then the mushroom too were just like talking. They were just sort of permeations on a possibility, just playing around with a head sculpture, making different versions of it

ZI: And downstairs is the piece that you’ve combined an arm and a flower

KS: Yeah it came out of another sculpture which was a figure of a woman standing and just you can see her spine on the back of her exposed and out of her spine came flowers. At the same time as thinking about making a statue where the veins come out of the wrists and extend out with a sort of combination of flowers coming out of your veins. In the last year or two years I was looking a lot at 19th century romantic sculpture in the United States. I think I’m moving into some sort of phase of more celebration or being happier in my life I guess, my work has filled with flowers and butterflies; symbols of happiness or something.

ZI: Something that struck me about the show at the Whitechapel was how like a church it is with a nave and then the side chapels, how do you feel about that reading of the exhibition?

KS: Yeah well I made it like that on purpose, I mean probably because I am this stupid, literal person and it is called Whitechapel and I took it for real but I’ve also for the last five years pretty much been making things based on church situations, making idols or something or making statues basically that fit into a sort of religious format. This time it has less Judaeo-Christian iconography, it has Mary Magdalene but the others are much less specific they are not really dealing with biblical references. Other pieces that I had made before, like Virgin Mary, ,or different pieces like Lot’s wife these are more like different possibilities fitting into that same formal form but without overt religious connotations.

ZI: Could you tell me about the dualities that I see running through your work both in terms of content and form, I mean things like the body and the soul, sexuality-spirituality and then in terms of form the fragile and the durable, seduction and repulsion?

KS: In Judeo-Christian history you have this very hierarchical duality that is always putting body and soul or sexuality and whatever it is but there is always a downside one part, there is always paying for the other and then basically means both spiritually or paying to there detriment so I like to kind of mush those things around together so that they’re not separate really. You are not really this thing all sort of cut up in different parts, it’s a much more holistic, complicated situation that has many contradictions in it but people live quite easily with contradiction, you know mass contradiction in their beings or mass complication of stuff so it seems a lot more appropriate to make things that have all those mixtures in one spot than to act as if they are all in opposition to one another.

ZI: I feel that your work contains autobiographical elements; in what ways do you feel your personal experience is directly feeding into your work?

KS: For me my work is totally about my personal life. It has a different emphasis in it as my life changes. I don’t like it to be really evident like in an overt, autobiographical way because my life isn’t particularly interesting to anybody, it is not particularly interesting to me. I think my work comes out of the necessity of my life that it is very directly connected to what I am trying to figure out or learn about.

ZI: Something that I noticed about the work at the Whitechapel was the scale of the figures the fact that they’re all just slightly smaller than life-size, can you tell me something about that, it’s quite peculiar?

KS: I’m 5’7 and I’m always very attracted to casting people much smaller than I am. At each stage of casting you’re losing scale. When you go from making a cast of someone’s body and then into wax and then you make a mould off that wax there’s a certain percentage lost and so then it starts getting miniature and in a way what’s interesting to me. I was walking in a park in Berlin last year and I saw on a pedestal a small-scale man, he was about 5’ high and it seemed really much more interesting than putting people up on pedestals and then making them larger than life to correct perspective. It seemed just as powerful to make them smaller than life.

ZI: The development of your work could be interpreted as a progression from the microscopic examination of the body through a larger, fragmented view to dealing with the body as a whole, is this how you feel your work has developed and what do you envisage the next step to be?

KS: I think it has actually. I used to say it wasn’t really a development going anywhere particularly. I think one version can be that you are just circling around in the garden sort of just walking around and there isn’t really a progress or development. On then on the other hand I have gone from making small body particles, to fragments, to whole bodies. In the last couple of years I’ve started bringing birds and butterflies and flowers and these other kinds of elements into things. I just want to go out in the world and be’ and that everything is a sort of extension of the self materialised out in the world or something like that so you can make work about furniture and it can be as significant or something like that as making just from your primary source and I think for me for really most of the last 15 years or something I’ve felt like I was in a sort of life and death struggle with being here to some extent and I don’t really feel so much like that now. I don’t feel threatened in the world as I did when I was younger. I think sometimes people’s work has as a relevance at a certain point and then it doesn’t. I think you have to be really sort of obedient and attentive to your artwork and really trust in a deep manner. It protects me and it teaches me and it tells me what to do and as close as I can I follow what it tells me to do. I really just like do anything, pretty much anything I think of to do, I trust that that is what I should be doing, it is not an area of my life where I have so much misgiving or something.