Kiki Smith Quotes

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 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.

You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I'm given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one's own vision.

The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.

I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world.

I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

Our culture seems to believe that it's entertaining to teach women to be frightened.

One's self is always shifting in relationship to beauty and you always have to be able to incorporate yourself or your new self into life. Like your skin starts hanging off your arms and stuff, and then you have to think, well that's really beautiful too. It just isn't beautiful in a way that I knew it was beautiful before.

Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.

One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.

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.

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.

I really love printmaking. It’s like a mystery and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in.

It's fun, in a way, to explore what's risky in one's life.

I think that sense of always traveling has something to do with anonymity and privacy and pleasure in having a very clear, very reductive life.

Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life.

Stained glass enabled the modern world.

If you stick to your work it will take care of you somehow.

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.

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.

As an artist, you want to have an experience. What you need to experience changes over the course of your life because your life changes.

I always say I'm Catholic - but a cultural Catholic. I wouldn't say I'm a spiritual person, although I pray every day.

Life is much larger than how we image it, always, but society can be constricting in ways.

The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life.

I like Betsy Ross as a model, too, the quilting bee, sitting around with your friends making art, asking what they think, so that you get the benefit of everyone's opinions and so it's not just about you in your you-dom.

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.

I certainly am one of those people who is incredibly privileged to have an art career, which happened out of luck. Then luck kept happening. Besides that, things just move along in their own weird way.

Sometimes your personal life is much more significant. Sometimes your work life is more significant. Friends and family, or sometimes the general population, take precedence.

Life changes a lot. I guarantee you.

I have to make about a million proofs of everything. I don’t know, it’s just a repetition, like a meditation. You come back to something and then you leave it, and then you come back again and you leave it, and each time it changes. And sometimes you have to wait for new information inside yourself to be able to finish something, to find out how it should go.

It's just disgusting that in this society, the majority of students in art school are women, but they amount to less than 30% of what is shown in museums. That has not changed radically.

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.

It was a very economically depressed time [the 80s] and because of that, there was a lot of space. Everything was relatively dilapidated, and one could live on a pretty low income. One could live well below the poverty line and not suffer immensely.

Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer.

Prior to my father's death, I was having a hard time committing to a career as an artist, but that's not because of who he was - it was because of who I am. It's true, though, that I felt I shouldn't compete with him, and that those feelings went away after he died.

My iPhone has changed my life - I spend hours taking photos of the sidewalk as I walk down the street. I like the casualness, that it's low-resolution.

My work life makes much less sense now than 20 years ago. It's Humpty-Dumpty-like in a way; I can't put the pieces back together.

When I was young, it was an exciting time to be in New York.

I'm not moving from an ideological standpoint. Sometimes I'm trying to make my life better. Sometimes I'm trying to make my life worse! I'm trying to find a happy medium that I can make some sense of.

I've been very lucky being in New York. While there are many things that have impacted my life, I have been able to stay here and do my own work.

My support system is simple - people and time. The miracle of other people in your life.

I first had no interest in figuration whatsoever.

Things that are very significant and important to you when constructing an identity when you're younger change.

I had stopped making figures, and then I began making images of animals in nature, which was a way to introduce the figure.

I'm in general a nostalgic person, but I don't know if I'm nostalgic for the 80s!

Now, it is much more difficult for young people coming to New York. But also when you're young, you have more time to interact with one another, to discover yourself with people of your generation.

When studio art started being seen as important, I joined Colab, and then I became very involved.

The miracle of being able to pay attention to other people in your life, and the miracle of being in time, and to continue being in time.