Kim Cridler Ornament and Form

Referencing open storage areas in museums that facilitate the formal and cultural study of objects and their histories, I am creating a large collection of ornamental vessels within case-like shelving units. The grid-like structure of the vessels will be fleshed out with ornamentation based on sketches and studies made during my practice of collecting plant material and insect life from the gardens, fields, and prairies around my home in Mazomanie, Wisconsin. This body of work, begun in the summer of 2009, will premier at a yearlong evolving installation beginning in July 2011 at the Racine Art Museum before traveling nationally.

Kim CridlerOrnament and Form

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Pail with Fish, 2010 is based on the ancient green situla from Latin for ‘bucket’; referring to an ancient decorated metal or pottery vessel shaped like a deep bucket, urn, or vase, often used in funeral rites. (Situla is also the name of the western star on the bucket of Aquarius). Fish connote procreation and the origin of life, renewed and sustained.

Background: A self-identified crafts practitioner, educated in the craft discipline of metalsmithing, I work as an artist with the intention of reinventing the relevance of craft to contemporary life. An object maker, I believe in the power of objects to enrich, record, and extend our lives. As a child growing up in rural Michigan, I learned my family history through utilitarian and decorative objects rather than photographs. It is no coincidence that I chose to study an area of craft, where ties to labor, to beauty and pleasure, to the utilitarian, and to the real and everyday actions of life have not been entirely severed.

Urn and vase forms, fundamental in my work, serve as icons of continuity and as a reminder of the world of making and using. Vessels have been used as containers for grain, for wine, for the bodies of our dead. They symbolize collection and preservation, as well as ceremony and abundance. A simple cup promises nourishment, warmth, and comfort. This information is carried both physically and emotionally in our expectations of its very form.

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Another root inquiry of my work is the use of ornamentation to enrich objects and environments. Old as humankind, this practice for most of the twentieth century has been excluded from mainstream Western art making and appreciation in the wake of modernism (6), as writes James Trilling in The Language of Ornament. Deep seated cultural fears linger in regards to ornament: the fear of artifice, fear of excess, fear of becoming morally and physically soft, and the fear that contemporary ornament is fundamentally inauthentic because of its reliance on traditions of the past. But for thousands of years, imparting ornamentation to every conceivable utilitarian object was seen as worthwhile, for the pleasure and beauty it imparted.

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Urn with Bees, 2009Steel, cast bronze35” wide x 70” high

Urn with Bees, 2009 is utilizing the symbolism of the urn, frequently used in funeral rites as a repository for ashes of the dead, usually closed with a cover. The sphere shaped swarm of bees becomes the cover; bees symbolizing immortality, rebirth, industry, and order.

Ornament, unlike many other art forms, is solely concerned with giving pleasure, but beauty and its pursuit can serve to remind us that what exits in nature, symmetry, balance, and proportion, can exist in our own lives and culture. Elaine Scary in her book On Beauty and Being Just explores this ethical component. She reminds that the word “fairness” can refer to the condition of being pleasing to look at, and the condition of being impartial or just as in “playing fair” (105). When experiencing something beautiful, Scary writes, for a moment we are no longer the central figure in our own private story, but feel ourselves to be adjacent or lateral. The energy and attention formerly working to protect or advance the self is now free to serve some other, possibly more egalitarian ideal.

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1 Footed Bowl with Apples, 2010

Steel, bees wax

55” wide by 36” deep by 42” high

2 Pail with Fish, 2010

steel, cast bronze, mother of pearl, silver

32” wide x 51” high

3, Front cover

Field Study #1, 2009

Steel, silver, gold

12.5 wide x 13.5” high

4 Urn with Bees, 2009

Steel, cast bronze

35” wide x 70” high

Inside cover

Bottle with Leaves, 2010

Bronze, horn

32.75” wide x 72” high