Today I’m choosing to research American Artist, Kiki Smith. What originally enticed me to focus on her is the work made in 1992, Hard Soft Bodies. The work is made entirely of paper mache. She views the work as spiritual, especially due to the fact it is fragile and light, much like a spirit would be. ”because they have no weight to them – they’re translucent and fragile – [and] have [a] quality of transcendence.” It also depicts human fragility, with the paper trails falling from the bottom half of the body reminiscent of human organs. A lot of her work tends to be focused on women and women’s bodies, their sexuality and more. I find a lot of her sculpture work also focuses on the fragility of human bodies (and the mind) which is something I want my sculpture work to focus in on too. Maybe less human bodies, however, but fragility as a whole is a very interesting and broad enough topic to do a lot of work on. I want to take away Kiki’s way of viewing her sculptures, as their own beings. She seems to view the works she makes as simply an outcome of her curiosities, but from then it becomes it’s own thing. “It has to sustain itself. It stems from me wanting to know what something is going to look like when I’m done. I’m completely influenced by where I am, what’s around me. I just react.”
https://aras.org/sites/default/files/docs/00069Fremont.pdf <- Page 14, Fremont https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/t-magazine/kiki-smith-artist-profile.html <- Nov 26 2018, Published by Nancy Hass, The New York Times Style Magazine
