Bowdoin College Museum of Art
News: Acquisitions
Recent Acquisition on View
- Posted: Oct 08, 2007
The Museum of Art recently purchased a porcelain sculpture by the noted contemporary artist Kiki Smith entitled Alice I (with Crossed Ankles), 2005. The work can be seen in Becoming a (Woman) Artist, one of the Museum’s reopening exhibitions, through November 25, 2007.
Kiki Smith is an acclaimed artist whose work explores themes of female body politics, birth, death, and regeneration. Smith is especially recognized for her sculptures, which, in recent years, have reflected her intimate exploration of the female figure. Inspired by folkloric images of women and animals, fairytales, and myth, Smith’s current work thematically wrestles with the mysterious constitution of identity, and how it is conveyed or disrupted through the interplay of body and human spirituality.
The idea behind Kiki Smith’s Alice I (with Crossed Ankles) derives from her interest in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and particularly, the moment in the text in which Alice drowns in her own tears. Smith compares Alice’s plight to “all of our self involvement, drowning in our own self-involvement while polluting nature and killing all the other animals.”1 The form and figure of Alice I (with Crossed Ankles) captures the pathos and psychological intensity of “self-involvement”.
Alice I (with Crossed Ankles) is crafted by Smith in fine white porcelain, a material that holds with it connotations of Wedgwood teacups, Chinese ornamental wares, and collectible dolls. Smith is able to elevate porcelain to the status of a modern medium, as she capitalizes on the material’s fragility to convey Alice’s internal vulnerability and isolates it from its standard decorative uses. The formal composition of Alice I represents the deteriorative physical manifestation of self-involvement. Alice’s delicate arms reach out in supplication, her face smooth and expressionless as her billowing dress and heavy locks appear to constrict her body. The absence of any color creates an extreme pallor, once considered the highest condition of female beauty, though now suggesting lifelessness. Her self-contained muted distress makes this Alice at once ethereally beautiful and one of Smith’s most psychologically complex works to date.
1 Bui, Phong and Harris, Susan. Interview with Kiki Smith. The Brooklyn Rail December 2006.
Pictured above:
Kiki Smith, Alice I (with Crossed Ankles), 2005
