Kiki Smith
I am a Wanderer

Modern Art Oxford
Photograph: Ben Westoby

Modern Art Oxford
Photograph: Ben Westoby

Modern Art Oxford
Photograph: Ben Westoby

The presentation at Modern Art Oxford in 2019 is the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work in the United Kingdom for almost twenty-five years (since Kiki Smith at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1995). It provides an amazing insight into the spectrum of the artist’s diverse practice, tracing its development through her career from the beginnings in the 1980s to the present day. The concept of the exhibition and the selection of works (generated in close collaboration with the artist) refer to the specific historic and phantasmagorical character of Oxford and its literary, philosophical and scientific research cultures. It is more than coincidental that the collecting tradition represented in Oxford by the overwhelming abundance of archaeological and ethnographic objects assembled from across the world and across all time periods embraces diversity and is evident of humankind in all its difference. The interdisciplinary and collaborative spirit of Smith’s oeuvre across the rich variety of media makes this exhibition a congenial counterpart for the arts and science context of Oxford’s renowned research culture. The political urgency of the artist’s work is as well contextualised by Modern Art Oxford’s longstanding commitment to artists’ political self- expression and solidarity with marginalised communities and cultures.

There is an abundance in Kiki Smith’s choice of materials. The exhibition emphasises her material experimentation, from bronze, plaster, glass, and porcelain to paper, pigment, aluminium, latex, feathers, and beeswax amongst countless others – demonstrating her constant curiosity and desire for discoveries. A major focus of the exhibition has been placed on three distinctive areas of Kiki Smith’s work: the small sculptures, a selection from her printmaking oeuvre, and the Jacquard tapestries.

Modern Art Oxford
Photograph: Ben Westoby

Modern Art Oxford
Photograph: Ben Westoby

The small sculptures presented in the show, several of them for the first time, derive from fairy tales and mythology, from legends and religion, and natural history – women and girls, seers and goddesses, birds and stars, heads and organs, shells, flowers, teardrops, cats, sheep and snakes: a menagerie. Smith unfurls an entire world populated by beings of different cultures in time and space, foreign as well as familiar ones: female figures in particular, hybrid creatures, animals of all kinds, plants and heavenly bodies in a variety of forms and materials.

The storytelling of these works corresponds with the narrative structure of the drawings and prints displayed in the exhibition. They unfold an all-encompassing universe of enchantment, spiritual dimension and individual mythology, which explores fairy tales and childhood. How charming to find “Alice in Wonderland” here, who lived as Alice Liddell, daughter of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church, the largest college of Oxford University, just moments away from Modern Art Oxford’s Pembroke Street home.

 “I am a wanderer,” Kiki Smith says. And indeed, she is a wanderer through time and space, making “contact” on a decades-long imaginary journey that takes her through foreign cultures. With the wanderlust of an ethnologist she roams through lands and historical epochs, collecting and preserving the heritage of our collective memory and creating visions of beauty, reconciliation and hope in a dystopian world as she would appeal for action.