The artist’s prophetic visions of femininity are helplessly stuck in the past
Methods of divination have been an idée fixe for Kiki Smith since at least her 1996 room-size installation Constellation, in which miniature glass animals, some taken from the zodiac, are arranged on a circle of indigo-dyed handmade paper. Thirty years on, Smith returns to that sibylline subject in this small retrospective of works from the late 1990s to the present. Next to the gallery’s reception desk is a gilded bronze cast of intestines, advertising the artist’s divinatory power by alluding to ancient practices of reading omens in the entrails of sacrificed animals. Prints resembling irises and pupils – formed of bright, thin lines twisting away from blank circles, on dark paper – are hung around the ground-floor room. They direct their sightlines towards Winter and Capricornus (both 2021), two bronze sculptures of life-size, rearing male goats, symbols of virility. Visible through a window, comets made from overlapping bronze panels are mounted to an outside wall. Smith’s grouping of occult omens prefigures a prophecy.
On the floor above, silver- and gold-leaf bronze butterflies appear to swarm up the walls, signalling an entrance into the dream vision. Hand-size bronze sculptures of small, flat snake bodies, pushed together like tinned sardines, are gilded and pockmarked with gemstones. On the walls, marks of vibrant paint and glitter embellish chromogenic prints of magnified crystals. Granular aquatint etchings in pinks and purples are stamped with hearts and diamonds, like a deck of oracle cards. The first of three rooms hosts bronze sculpture Rest Upon (2009), a life-size lamb lying on the torso of a sleeping girl. Standing and resting around her are three more bronze lambs, Flock (2025). Behind the installation a set of drawings depict a pair of wolves and a pair of goats, and a cat, hare and duck. Smith’s hesitant line may weaken the drawings as standalone works, but as a backdrop to the ovine sculptures, they complete the famous scene of Judgment Day prophesied in the Old Testament: ‘The wolf will live with the lamb … and a little child shall lead them.’ In this part of the show, Smith delivers on her promise of prophecy by depicting a coalition of innocents – little girl and lambs – in a mutually protective relationship.
The prophetic aura in this show falters when Smith is repeating previous works nearly verbatim, giving us a portal to the past rather than the promised vision of futurity. The show’s final major sculpture is Dark Water (2023), a two-dimensional blue-bronze panel cut to the shape of a nude female figure, her features etched into the metal. Liquid appears to spill from her orifices in flat bronze tendrils that extend to the brown-bronze base along with her long hair, suspending her body in midair. It repeats the premise of a previous work, Untitled (1990), in which anatomically correct, lifelike wax models of a man and woman hang from metal stands, leaking semen and milk from their penis and breasts respectively. Dark Water has a doubly (if not deliberately) retro effect, resembling the illustrative style of ecofeminist Monica Sjöö. Such second-wave feminist celebrations of women’s biological functions and the mother archetype attempted to rebuke patriarchy and capitalism, but their political and philosophical limitations have become increasingly clear over the last three decades. In looking back, Smith fails to address how gender paradigms have shifted in the last half-century, her prophetic foresight apparently myopic about the conditions of the present.
Kiki Smith at Timothy Taylor, London, through 1 November
