Kiki Smith: The Road to Artist (A Quick Summary)

"I didn't originally intend to be an artist. (Posner 31)" Many artists, from a young age, begin to attempt and focus their work, by working in one medium or one subject, trying for years to make sense of their controlled substance. Then, an artist such as Kiki Smith comes along. She had no intention of making "art", until she began to externally present what was within her.

She was born in Germany in 1954, growing up in New Jersey and gravitating to New York City in the 70's. She was raised surrounded by art, and was influenced by her father, Tony Smith, as well as Richard Tuttle, an artist who lived with her family while she was young. As a child she would help her father build cardboard models of his large, abstract sculptures. As she grew older, she became interested in crafts and decorative arts. "I always liked making things. (Posner 11)" She went to school for industrial baking and soon became bored. She wanted to be a potter, then a fabric designer, until her twenties, when she began to draw still lifes of cigarette packs and bottles of pills.

These soon lead to her creating pillowcases and sheets decorated with cut up body parts using fabric paint. She claims this was due to ".how my internal psychic life felt. I felt in disarray, fragile. (Posner 31)" This was the beginning of Kiki Smith transforming figurative art by turning the human body inside out. In the 1970's she joined Colab (Collaborative Projects, Inc.) which was a group that worked with art in "unconventional" terms. The most well-known exhibition was titled " Times Square 1980," which included some of Smith's anatomy paintings she had done based on "Gray's Anatomy."

She began to show the idea of mortality through her work when her father passed away. One example is a piece titled "Hand in Jar," in which she placed a latex glove filled with pond water into a mason's jar, in which algae began to grow. Kiki Smith trained to be an EMT in 1985 to have a deeper sense of the human anatomy, which led her further into the human body, concentrating on organs and bodily systems. One such piece is titled "Second Choice," featuring a ceramic bowl containing ceramic lungs, liver, heart, and spleen.

From death comes life, as shown when she cast a womb in bronze, which opens to reveal nothing. Veering towards topics that general society steers against; she has faced these head on. Her focus on the human body varies throughout her career, from "Pee Body," in which a caste squat figure made of wax pees yellow beads, to "From Heart to Hand," a self-explanatory piece made of ink on gampi paper. She is an artist who varies her mediums and manipulates her subjects, bringing sensitivity to both. She explains this, stating, "I want to have as many different experiences as I can. (Posner 37)"

As her interest strayed from the body, she began to work with social and economic issues, specifically animals. Her first work in this these was based on the poisoning of crows with pesticides in New Jersey. She stated this by presenting the crows' lifeless bodies in bronze, in a repetitive fashion. From here, she created landscapes of her own, fashioning the heavens from paper, glass stars and caste animal feces, glass pythons, male deer, and over 300 delicate ceramic eggs to represent fertility.

To sum up her career, Kiki Smith states, "My work is about my life, and it protects my life. I trust my motives for doing things because I know they are deeply connected to me; the more I look after them, the more they will look after me. (Posner 28)

Posner, Elaine. Kiki Smith. Bullfinch Press, 1998.