The next contemporary artist is Kiki Smith. Smith is popular for creating nude prints and sculptures of men and women, but specifically representing women as figures for reproduction, menstruation, and motherhood. Her sculptures revolve around feminine work and explore the physical aspects of the women’s body. In her sculpture Train, made from wax, a woman stands in a small room with red beads flowing out of her vagina. The red beads stand out in the sculpture, because they create a trail behind the woman to symbolize blood and menstruation. The woman’s body is faced towards the wall, but her face turns around to look at the “train” of blood she created. This sculpture represents the human experience of women, because getting a period allows
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The couple is in the nude and represent lifelessness, because of their bruises and blood on their bodies. Smith was raised Roman Catholic, and she uses her upbringing in her work. The couple is a symbol of crucifixion, as their bodies hang lifeless and dull. In Smith’s early work, a common theme is mortality. She uses mortality in her work, because she lost many family members in her life. In Peter Plagens interview with Smith, she explains “my younger work was about mortality…My father died [in 1980], and then my sister died. That altered my perception of the world. I was also a fairly morbid child. And then, at a certain point, I started paying attention to things outside myself.” An interesting aspect that Smith uses in her works of sculptures and paintings are the various mediums she uses. Untitled was created using beeswax. Hustvedt continues by explaining the effect Smith’s work has on viewers, “the longer I looked at her work, the more I became convinced that hers is an art of shifting borders, an art that disrupts divisions, categories, separations, and definitions of our own bodies in relation to the world around us. The fact that her bodies and parts of bodies, human and animal, in two dimensions and three, are rendered in a profligate array of materials--fabric, paper, beeswax, bronze, hair, porcelain, latex, glass, aluminum, pewter, gold, wood, feathers, jewels, Plexiglas, pigment, and
The couple is in the nude and represent lifelessness, because of their bruises and blood on their bodies. Smith was raised Roman Catholic, and she uses her upbringing in her work. The couple is a symbol of crucifixion, as their bodies hang lifeless and dull. In Smith’s early work, a common theme is mortality. She uses mortality in her work, because she lost many family members in her life. In Peter Plagens interview with Smith, she explains “my younger work was about mortality…My father died [in 1980], and then my sister died. That altered my perception of the world. I was also a fairly morbid child. And then, at a certain point, I started paying attention to things outside myself.” An interesting aspect that Smith uses in her works of sculptures and paintings are the various mediums she uses. Untitled was created using beeswax. Hustvedt continues by explaining the effect Smith’s work has on viewers, “the longer I looked at her work, the more I became convinced that hers is an art of shifting borders, an art that disrupts divisions, categories, separations, and definitions of our own bodies in relation to the world around us. The fact that her bodies and parts of bodies, human and animal, in two dimensions and three, are rendered in a profligate array of materials--fabric, paper, beeswax, bronze, hair, porcelain, latex, glass, aluminum, pewter, gold, wood, feathers, jewels, Plexiglas, pigment, and