Throughout her thirty-year career, artist Kiki Smith has repeatedly employed techniques warranting the recognition of her artistic process. Her photographs fulfill a similar purpose, documenting everything from the onset of inspiration to the final result.

Cinematic sequences of Smith's visions and revisions are packaged into five symmetrical grids and woven through the critical findings of curator Elizabeth A. Brown in an adventurous journey through the artist's creative routine. But Brown's essay has been written so well and Smith's work presented so well, that it's hard to ignore a craving for the raw, unsaturated beauty of each fiber separately.



One can note right away that elements of Smith's sculpting process are analogous to experimental photography. Playing with "exposure" or time, she will often snatch formations at a premature stage, noting the beauty within each stage of gestation.

Smith often places her sculpture as the subject in her photographs, although the quality of these images is what makes this a book about photography. Through compositional strategies, dramatic framing, and playful choices in space, time, and dimension, Smith nearly exploits her own sculptures as she snatches transient moments that would without a camera go unpreserved.



Even banal objects that served as Smith's inspiration, notes Elizabeth A. Brown, "help us to see through her eyes." One cannot tell, for example, whether Smith has photographed a row of winter trees or the close-up of someone's pulmonary chamber.



The book explores how these images came about, too, a concept that only coincides with Smith's character. Like other art mediums dependent on craft, the casting (or molding) process involves a decent amount of waiting time. For Smith, this seemed like a good moment to take some pictures. At other times, Smith was inspired to capture the aesthetic imperfections of her process. The result, whether prompted by boredom, inspiration, or practical assessment, is a body of work completely independent of Smith's original sculpture. —Rena Silverman