Kiki Smith Quotes

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

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.

Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life.

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.

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

I always thought it was a trap to fit into ideologies, and maybe that's a luxury position, but my work is a reflection of my being here. My being here is not a reflection of an idea.

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

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

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.

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.

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

When you get older, you're running out of time. You care more about trying to stay on the planet a little longer, so you can learn how to draw better!

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.

I think a lot of making art is listening to yourself.

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

We as beings are very contradictory, complicated creatures that work in our best interest and against our best interest. In a certain way, I want my work to have all that messiness.

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

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.

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.

The point of art is that it always has the necessity to expand because people are inherently expanding.

Life really changes. And it gets lighter, for the most part. You tolerate yourself and others better.

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