Statement & Bio

Short Biography:

Trained as a metalsmith, Kim creates works that utilize the history, making, and meaning of craft and domestic ornamentation. She currently teaches as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. An undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Kim earned an MFA in Metals from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and studied at Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. Kim has taught in art programs across the country including University of Michigan, San Diego State University, Arizona State University, and the Penland School of Crafts.

Awards include Visual Arts Fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work is featured in public collections including the Arizona State University Art Museum, the Arkansas Art Center Decorative Museum of Art, the California State University Long Beach Art Museum, the Chazen Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture, the Scottsdale Contemporary Museum of Art, and the Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz.

Artists Statement:

I love objects. As a child growing up in rural Michigan, I learned my family history through utilitarian and decorative objects rather than photographs. I came to know those who crafted, repaired and used these objects through the pieces themselves. It is no coincidence that I chose to study craft, an area whose ties to labor, the sensual, the utilitarian, and the real and everyday actions of life have not been entirely severed.

Urn and vase forms, fundamental in my work, serve as icons of continuity and as a reminder of the world of making and using. Vessels have been used through out our history as containers for grain, for wine, for the bodies of our dead. They symbolize collection, preservation, and ceremony, connoting containment and possession as well as bounty and abundance. I believe that the forms, processes, and materials that give flesh to objects of utility and ornament are rich with content, and consider this to be the subject of my work.

In my work, the grid-like forms represent a way of understanding, stable and enduring but without lived experience. Materials with rich associations such as woven hair, cast soap made from lye and fat, cast and carved beeswax, and the use of stretched and stitched gut or silk, are ways of casting different values and histories against the skeletal armatures. The materials I introduce, the patterns and ornamentation I render, complete these structures with the kind of emotional and sensual meaning that knowledge and language cannot adequately account for.

Current work:

I am working on a collection of patterned and ornamented vessels to be presented on simple shelving structures. These case-like structures will reference the open storage areas in museums, such as those seen at The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and are intended to facilitate the formal and poetic study of the tensions between structure and ornament. The vessels will be adorned with ornamental forms based on the sketches and studies I create from the gardens, fields, and prairies around my home in Mazomanie, Wisconsin.

This project and the investigative process at its heart is testimony to my ongoing research of the vessel format and my love for and interest in Wisconsin, its sheer physical grandeur and its rich history, its settlements and displacements. I hope this attempt to understand my surroundings through study and research will provide me, a more recent settler, to find a place for myself in the order of things.