Constellation

The acclaimed New York artist Kiki Smith employs a wide range of nontraditional materials in a diverse body of work that includes painting, photography, books, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. Throughout her prolific career, she has focused on the body and the natural world. A room-size installation, Constellation consists of a large, circular field of leaves of indigo-dyed Nepalese paper, arranged on the floor. Twenty-nine hot-sculpted glass animals are placed on the paper, along with cast glass stars and hundreds of pieces of cast bronze animal scat. Among the glass animals are a hare, a dog, a snake, bears, a bull, a scorpion, a ram, birds, and a goat. Together, they refer to 27 constellations, including such well-known star patterns as Ursa Major and Minor, Scorpius, Aries, and Cancer, as well as lesser-known ones, such as Corvus (the crow), Lacerta (the lizard), and Delphinus (the dolphin). Almost all of these constellations—16 in the northern sky and 10 in the southern sky—are visible to people throughout the world. Smith also included one star pattern—Musca Borealis, the fly of the north—that is no longer recognized. The animal forms were inspired by images in an early 19th-century celestial atlas.* For this work, Smith chose to include only animal constellations, focusing on animals for the simple and compelling reason that they are threatened. Concerned about extinction, she wrote, “How do you construct an identity without animals?” (see below Smith and Smith, p. 23). In Smith’s work, the ferocity and vulnerability of animals are also a metaphor for the human condition. Unsigned. Published: Siri Engberg, Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005, Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005, p. 71, fig. 28; Helaine Posner, Kiki Smith, Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1998, pp. 164–165; and Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Kiki Smith, Paradise Cage: Kiki Smith and Coop Himmelb(l)au, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996, p. 23. See also “Kiki Smith,” www.usfcam.usf.edu/gs/artists/smith_kiki/kiki.html. * Alexander Jamieson, A Celestial Atlas: Comprising a Systematic Display of the Heavens in a Series of Thirty Maps: Illustrated by Scientific Description of Their Contents and Accompanied by Catalogues of the Stars and Astronomical Exercises, London: G. & W. B. Whittaker, 1822.