Hello and welcome to the 28th interview for my interview blog 3 Art Questions With Jackson! This time I interviewed super talented artist Kim Matthews who makes art that is different than anything I've seen before, which is not easy to do. I really like Kim's art in person in galleries and online. She is the 2nd artist I have asked about the global pandemic. Kim took the time to give me some really great answers and I think you will like them too. Thank you for reading!
Jackson: What inspired you to become an artist? How did you settle on your totally unique style?
Kim: I don't know of anyone who just decided to become an artist, although I guess it happens. It's a weird affliction; I suspect you're "born that way," as the saying goes. I started making stuff when I was really little and from the time I was in kindergarten or first grade I knew I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. I drove my mom nuts because I was always making paper cutouts and there were bits of paper all around the house. I grew up in rural Maine, so we didn't have much in the way of art classes or anything else; we shared an art teacher among the three schools in our district, so art class was like a half-hour long every other week or something. It seemed like I never finished my projects.
Thanks for the compliment on my "style." I'm not sure if I have a style as much as a way of working that's based on the materials at hand or of interest, available time, whatever skill I can bring to bear, physical limitations, and some mysterious, unnameable impulse that comes from the universe. I'm working on two distinct bodies of work now: the modular sculptures you saw at Minnetonka, and a series of 108 meditation drawings that I started late last year. To maybe answer your question a little better, my first sculptures were constructed of reed or wire armatures covered in paper I made. In addition to being really into materials, I'm a process nerd, so I was working with Eastern fibers, cooking the raw material, beating it by hand, and so on, which is really time-consuming and a fine craft unto itself. And the work was fragile and I got concerned about things getting destroyed in shipping or at an exhibition, because by then I was showing my work at a gallery in south Minneapolis. So gradually I started working with commercial papers, fabric, etc., and kind of went from there. The next thing I knew, I was being referred to as a "fiber artist," which I did not like one bit. People like to label, and as soon as they've done that, there are no more questions to ask and they can feel satisfied and move on. This is also why I gradually moved away from strictly organic forms to the wonky geometry that you know. I'm interested in work that's open ended and asks more questions than it answers, so there's nothing worse for me than for someone to come up to me at a show and say, "I know! It's an ACORN," or whatever...because any reference is a point of entry into the work, not the purpose of it. I mean, you make something, and people respond to it as they will, with their own level of interest, education, expectations, and so on, but the artist has some say in it--so I just moved into a nonobjective approach so viewers were sort of forced to consider the work as itself first.
Jackson: Has the global pandemic impacted your life and how you make art? Has it affected your shows? I had some things cancelled or postponed.
Kim: This has been the weirdest year ever. I support myself primarily through contract work and have always wanted to work from home so I didn't have to commute or deal with the office politics or the distraction of people having conversations around me while I'm trying to hyperfocus. So I finally got my wish but I suspect I'm going to be looking for work after the first of the year.
Deadly plague aside, it's been great to be at home. My home office is my studio, so when I get up to stretch my legs or rest my eyes, I can look at what I'm making or tweak something. Plus my cats are super-happy and I get to listen to music all day without headphones. But I'm sure it affects how I make art because everything affects it. Being in a considerably less stressful environment has given me more time and energy to do my work, so that sure helps with the sanity level.
I shipped a work to a university in Tennessee months ago for a show, and by the time it got there they had shut down the campus, and then the work just sat there for months until the gallery director could get back in and send everything back. I was in North of the 45th at the DeVos Museum in Michigan this year, and that had to go digital, but they produced a nice catalog and website for the show that they might not have done otherwise. I have a piece IRL! at the Rockford Museum for the Rockford Midwestern Biennial now. The real bummer has been not being able to travel. I try to go to New York a couple times a year, and my friend and I were all jazzed to see the Donald Judd show among others, and then we had to cancel. But I've also been in some online shows and am part of a pretty exciting project with Odetta Digital, so we'll see where that goes. It's such an odd time--some interesting opportunities that might not have existed without the pandemic, and then economic uncertainty and political turmoil. I have been extremely fortunate to have good health, and as much as I miss my mom, who died in 2012, and my best friend, who died right around this time two years ago, I'm so grateful they didn't have to be subjected to what we're dealing with now.
Jackson: If you could meet any artist living or dead, who would it be and why?
Kim: I think it would have to be Constantin Brancusi. Some of his work hasn't aged well--the figurative things--but he was groundbreaking in the way that he conceived a sculpture and the support on which it rests as a fully integrated whole but using contrasting materials. And he was masterful with all of them: cast bronze and carved marble, wood, and stone. I wish I had a fraction of that know-how...goals! Plus, he was a deeply spiritual man, involved in Theosophy, as were Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and others, so we share an interest in Eastern religion and philosophy. Isamu Noguchi, another one of my heroes for similar reasons, studied with Brancusi in Paris. There are other important artists too: Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, Lee Bontecou...and I'm trying to get my hands on everything I can find about Tony Smith who, aside from being sculptor Kiki Smith's dad, was a designer, architect, painter, sculptor, and mystic. I think it's really important for artists to know where they come from, so I read a fair amount of art history, which I love, and which informs my work a great deal.
kimmatthewsart.com