University of Wisconsin –Madison art professor Kim Cridler recently completed installing the windows at the Racine Art Museum's 5th Gallery in the exhibition “My Wisconsin Home.” The 5th Gallery pays homage to the museum's previous life as a department store and represents a long, shallow although tall space that features the work of one artist for an entire year. Metalsmith artist Cridler acqired a two-year grant to help complete the iron vessels adorned with natural elements surrounding her at her Wisconsin home, with the sculptures now displayed upon massive iron shelves similar to a library or historic archive, similar to the 'cabinet of curiosities.' While viewing her finished work from outside the windows, Cridler speaks to the process involved in their creation.
The windows filled with your vessels look spectacular. Could you talk about why you work with vessels?
The vessel is based on forms from antiquity, the amphora and the urn. It refers to the intimacy of using something everyday whether a basket, bottle, bucket or vase. There is a history of containment and culture about the vessel other than through the references to decorative arts. Vessels are both physical and sensual, decorative, functional and practical. They can be sacred as with a cup or as a funerary jar. They contain something metaphorical and ritualistic, or a real element, such as water.
Your Pail With Fishes was in Madison's Wisconsin Triennial Exhibition last year. Could you tell us about how it was conceived and constructed?
The pail could be a funerary vessel, and it could also hold bait when fishing. Again, we're looking at vessels from antiquity and how they can be the precious or ordinary and the valued or valueless. The fish on top are moving in circles, the cyclical life force of generations. This [the project]also speak about an accumulation of skills as an artist, a metalsmith laboring to understand the materials. There's probably over 3300 parts welded together [to form the pail] and then jewelry scale casting of the bronze fish with the setting of mother of pearl eyes.
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How long does each piece take to make?
I began many of these pieces in 2009 when I applied for the fellowship. I work slow because I teach as well and you weld piece by piece in steps toward a larger vessel. But after you weld the vessel then you cast the bronze bees or fish [applied to the pieces], or carve the water buffalo horn into leaves [as in Bottle with Leaves] or in the work Rowan Tree [a large shallow, compote like bowl]. I used beeswax and then carnelian for the berries, which are set in prongs similar to jewelry [similar to a stone set in jewelry]. On another vessel I applied the lilies, actually a funky variety known as the 'Bare Naked Lady' lily because they're flowers without foliage. I cast vitreous china to make the lilies, and attach them to the vessel. So there is a lot of processes I'm using within each vessel, which takes a considerable amount of time.
Who made the steel bookshelves the vessels are displayed on?
The bookshelves are welded steel, 81/2 feet tall by 5 feet wide on castors so they can be moved. The patterns and grids can be changed on the exteriors of them. A local craftsman from Lodi [Wisconsin] Dean Allen constructed them, so I tried to incorporate talent from my local area. The whole project, the vessels, the ones titled Field Studies, looks at pattern, ornamentation and repetition through nature, which can be then seen on the shelving. Right now, the nature is very orderly but in the future [when I change the windows] it will get more out of control. These [the vessels] represent an art form, the decorative arts, which is about pleasure and didn't do well in Modernism. Pleasure can be used [as in the decorative arts] to heighten experiences and waken our emotions.
What's ahead in your artistic future?
I just completed a public art project in Oshkosh, Alma Arbor, for the first new academic building constructed on the University of Wisconsin campus in 40 years. A Beech tree will be growing in a huge bronze vessel, only one of several permanent installations. My husband is an industrial designer and helped me with this installation, and is very supportive of my work. I'm actually taking a sabbatical from teaching this year because I have an exhibition at Kendall College and at the Memphis Metal Museum. I also have two changes planned for these windows, perhaps one next May, which will be a huge steel and bronze Oak branch, an Oak Savannah, resting in the window, over the vessels. They're [the oak tree] so incredibly resilient. I'm so inspired by the potential of the decorative arts. People relate to them because we use and work with them, they're familiar.
The Racine Art Museum features Kim Cridler's "My Wisconsin Home" exhibition in the 5th Gallery, and for more information on Cridler, or the exhibition and coordinating programming, visit www.ramart.org
