Kiki Smith
Born 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany
Lives in New York, USA
Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary work that explores embodiment and the natural world. She uses a broad variety of materials to continuously expand and evolve a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles.
Harbor, 2015
cotton Jacquard tapestry
Spinners, 2014
cotton Jacquard tapestry, hand-painting and gold leaf
Congregation, 2014
cotton Jacquard tapestry
Cathedral, 2013
cotton Jacquard tapestry
Underground, 2012
cotton Jacquard tapestry
Courtesy of the artist & Pace Gallery
Presentation at the 23rd Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from Goethe-Institut Australia
Kiki Smith has been exhibiting her artwork internationally for over 30 years, but this is her first significant presentation in Australia. With a unique style that draws on mythology, folklore, fairytales, feminism and religious iconography, she often incorporates the human body as a form that unites us with one another, while also highlighting our interconnectedness with other non-human players: birds, wolves, wild forests and starlit skies feature prominently.
Each one of these five tapestries took a year to complete in a collaborative process between the artist and the Californian fine art print studio Magnolia Editions. Smith begins by constructing huge collages with Nepalese paper, glitter, pencil, watercolours and a host of other materials and textures, which are then photographed and printed at one-third the size for her to rework by hand. After numerous exchanges in this way each piece is finally converted into a tapestry via a complex, automated weaving process on a Jacquard loom. Despite the uniform surface of the tapestries, their beginning as multi-layered collages remains evident.
The artist was inspired by the largest-known medieval tapestry, commissioned in 1373 and depicts an apocalyptic narrative from the Book of Revelation. Smith’s tapestries, too, evoke the apocalyptic, but from a contemporary standpoint of environmental degradation and species vulnerability.
‘We are stressing the earth in very dramatic, unnecessary ways, and so it makes a lot more sense to say: Oh no, I am nature also… nature and me we have the same interests… we all have a better chance co-existing if we’re not so harmful.’
– Kiki Smith
