Artist entry #9/sculptor #4 Kiki Smith

Artist entry #9/sculptor #4 Kiki Smith

I chose her for this statement because I saw her on the Art21 website and her work seemed interesting. She works with a variety of media like sculpture, drawing and prints. She is a Feminist artist(not that I have anything against that) but you can tell she has a strong belief in it because her work is strongly influenced by the female body and incorporates it into her work somehow. She shows narrative of female sexuality and sexism they face everyday, she also likes to show mythological or folklore stories through her works. Since she was the daughter of a sculptor she was destined to have remarkable artistic abilities.

I like her her because it's so dark, some people would take great offense to her work because of the images and stories they depict. Her piece the "Hanging Women" is a perfect example of this. Most people would be disgusted by the image of a female figure hanging from a noose from the ceiling, I think it's a very interesting. The reason being when we think of women we tend to think of beauty, dainty and sex; but she completely takes the female form and gives it a whole meaning. I found myself fascinated with what lead up to the events to the apparent suicide, I feel like I need to know the back story. I also like her piece "Born"(pic where deer giving birth to female) again disturbing but the narrative clearly ties in with the piece. The piece shows on one level the human impact on everything in the environment, as humans we have made such an impact on the world that animals are giving birth to humans. It also ties into her fascination with mythology; she use Greek mythology for this narrative, it's about Diana the Greek goddess of the hunt is always with a deer.

I read an article about her talking about her work and I got the impression she is a lot like me where we hate to talk about our work, I would prefer to let my work tell the story. She also seems like she would get irritated by people asking question about her work and I can relate to that as well. To me she seems like a badass women who tells it like it is and doesn't care what you think and I love people like that.