Kiki Smith Quotes.
If you stick to your work it will take care of you somehow.
I didn’t start to be an artist myself until I was 24.
The point isn’t to know what you’re doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.
I’m reminded of the arm, and the body, and the appendage.
One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.
I think that objects have memories. I’m always thinking that I’ll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime.
Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative… I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.
I got into animals by drawing hair follicles. I liked drawing hair, and from that I got into feathers and fur, then into images of animals. The patterning is the same, but the proportions of the body change from one animal to the next. A lot of it is just geometry and consciousness.
Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.
In our family, there wasn’t anything else besides art. Nothing else in the world existed. My father never spoke about going to a movie or listening to music, other than my mother’s singing.
I trust my work. It’s a collaboration with the material, and when it’s viewed, it’s a collaboration with the world.
I like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility.
It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world.
Our culture seems to believe that it’s entertaining to teach women to be frightened.
Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life.
As a child I prayed that my calling be revealed – but not with expectation and not with a destination. I became an artist because I didn’t know what to do and I thought it was really fun to make things.
Life is much larger than how we image it, always, but society can be constricting in ways.
I told the students [at Yale] we were going to talk about love – I meant love in the sense of devotions to one’s work – and about half the students got really pissed off.
Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.
