Tag: birds

Kiki Smith, Flight Mound, 1998

Materials

silk-screened fabric, cotton batting, silicon bronze

Description

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh provided Kiki Smith with their extensive collections as source material for her installation. She made detailed drawings of a variety of pelts from birds that nest in western Pennsylvania. The drawings were made by scratching lines directly into Kodalith film, and were then transferred to 25 different silkscreens.

Smith printed the bird drawings onto printed fields of color that were based on the feather colors of the birds. The printed fabric pieces were trimmed, numbered and then photographed. Smith used the photographs to design the quilts, which consist of two or three segments from different printed pieces. She chose to combine Eastern European floral print fabrics for the backsides of the blankets. We constructed the 68 blankets by piecing together the floral printed fabric, matching it to front pieces at random.

The forty black patinaed bronze bluejays in the exhibition were cast from a wax bird carved by Smith. Smith rearranged the packing quilts and the cast birds several times before arriving at their final configuration: a single mound, with a black quilt on the top, allowing only the edges of the ones beneath to be visible with the 40 birds across the gallery floor oriented in a single direction.