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KIKI SMITH: There aren’t commemorative 
sculptures for, for witches.

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So then I thought oh I wanted 
to make these women on pyres.

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Their arms are out like, 
like Christ you know saying,

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why have you forsaken me?

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They should be in all these towns in Europe.

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You know, so no one has 
needed it in their town yet,

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but (LAUGHS), but, but you know I,

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I thought I can have, you know,

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you know I just make them anyway.

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Art is something that moves from 
your insides into the physical world,

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and at the same time it is just 
a representation of your inside,

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in a different form.

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Basically, I think art is…

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it’s just a way to think.

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You know it’s like standing in the wind

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and letting it pull you where, 
whatever direction it wants to go.

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And you know things start saying 
pay attention to this and make this.

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You know I think when I was in school

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it was very difficult for me to learn how to read.

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And so I just had to learn from looking at things.

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I saw a picture in the 
Louvre of Geneviève with the,

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sitting with the uh, wolves and the lambs.

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And Geneviève’s like the savior of Paris.

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And so I drew my friend, 
Geneviève as the Geneviève.

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And I cut up and made cartoons out of her.

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And I made sculptures afterwards.

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First I made the Geneviève where 
she’s just standing next to a wolf.

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And then I made RAPTURE where the 
woman’s walking out of the wolf.

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It’s this sort of resurrection.

30
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I just have this inventory of images 
and I can start mixing them up.

31
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And if you make them like a kind of character.

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They get to live again.

33
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They get to have this life 
outside of just one version.

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I have one standing Geneviève.

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You know I just cut her up over and over and over,

36
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and reconfiguring it and sort 
of smoothing the seams out.

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This could have a little bit of heat going.

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You know just, just to smooth out slightly.

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A lot of times I’d go into the molds

40
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and just make papier-mâché sculptures

41
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and then you can cut them up really easily

42
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and you know put them back together.

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Wax is much more complicated 
and then we spend you know,

44
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endless quantities of time trying to fix them. 


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It would be much faster in a way just to 
cast another person and redo it, but it…

46
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I don’t know, it’s just funny to me to make 
it all keep coming out of the same sculpture.

47
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And this I’ll make in aluminum

48
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and they’ll go on this sort 
of wood, wood crutches.

49
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So it will kind of lean back uh, 
he’ll lean back a bit like that

50
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and then it will be on this 
sort of floating in air.

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To me it’s something interesting 
about sculpture or something

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hovering off the ground, or having this,

53
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like a different relationship to the ground.

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It could be like that.
SMITH: And how fast does this set up?

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MAN: About five minutes.

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SMITH: Oh that’s great.

57
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SMITH: It’s going to become a, a dead witch under…

58
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uh, a pile of wood. But uh, you know so

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and then I thought about the 
wicked witch in the WIZARD OF OZ,

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cause she’s under the house.

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So that I’m just under a 
wood pile in the backyard.

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When I was a kid, my father had 
my grandmother’s death mask.

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She died like about twenty 
years before I was born.

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And then uh, when my father died,

65
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my sister Bebe and I made a 
death mask of his head and hands.

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And then uh, when my sister died,

67
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then I went back and I made a 
death mask of her hands and head.

68
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And so I have like three 
generations of death masks.

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That’s pretty good.

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Kiki VO: We were a little 
bit like the Adams Family.

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We lived in this big house and there was a gravestone with our name in front of the house.

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And you know we had this enormous 
sculpture in the back of the house.

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Kiki: And uh, you know we were really unpopular

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and the kids would say I was a witch.

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And you know we were really....

76
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And my father had a beard and a Porsche

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and we were really like mortified,

78
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embarrassed you know that he had a car like that

79
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and didn’t have, you know, 
a big Woody station wagon.

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Kiki VO: We made mostly paper models for him.

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Like thousands of tetrahedron 
and octahedron flattened models.

82
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And then we would sit and 
put them together, you know,

83
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after school every day. In my family 
there was always a kind of morbidity.

84
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My father would always say 
that, that it’s Irish Catholic.

85
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One whole part of our house was all uh,

86
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my father’s parent’s clothing, 
all from you know the late 1800’s…

87
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and teeth you know, people’s dentures.

88
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It was all, you know, lots 
of death, death everywhere.

89
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You know I spent a couple 
years drawing dead animals....

90
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I had this vision of, that I was 
supposed to make another Noah’s ark

91
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but it was of dead animals.

92
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Kiki VO: This was when my cat died.

93
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I made all these sort of Pietà,

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sort of self-portrait Pietà 
of me holding my dead cat.

95
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And I made like fifty billion 
prints of dead animals

96
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and I think hmm, how come I 
own all those prints still?

97
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My big investment in my future.

98
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Kiki: Gorgeous, calm down…

99
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–no you’re supposed 
to come down you dumb bird!

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Here…

101
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I just, I really love printmaking.

102
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It’s just this scratch, scratchy,

103
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scratchy motion that I like the best.

104
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BILL: This blade is so warm it 
dries this stuff right away.

105
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BILL: If you were to understand 
that the way she works this,

106
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this is just normal because every 
fiber of her body is about art.

107
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She can’t do anything but what she does.

108
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My father taught us to trust our intuition.

109
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You know my mother would always 
say believe your intuition

110
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that always you get in trouble 
when you don’t pay attention to it.

111
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You know I don’t think in other aspects of 
my personal life or daily life I do that,

112
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but always in my art I do that.

113
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And sometimes I don’t like where my art is 
going or something but I always know that …

114
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you know and I always go like why 
do I have to be making these things,

115
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or it’s embarrassing or something like that

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but I always trust that that’s what 
is appropriate for me to be doing.

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I mean for me, I’m just trying to 
have as many experiences as I can

118
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in sort of playing in different forms.

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I love domestic life like, you know 
like cupboards and blankets and dishes.

120
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You know, the first blanket I made,

121
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she was a witch with her consorts 
of all her familiars, her animals.

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Kiki: And then I thought this could 
be another female image with animals.

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And I’m a big Virgin Mary fan.

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Catholicism is all about storytelling.

125
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You know about reiterating 
over and over and over again

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these sort of mythological stories.

127
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Dolls and things like that 
are in the realm of fiction.

128
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I’ll carry them around and then

129
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I’ll break their leg off

130
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or their head gets knocked off or something,

131
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but none of that is really seen in the end at all

132
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but to me that’s really a 
big part about making it.

133
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This stuff makes me nervous.

134
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Cause they’re so specific.

135
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Like a story, I don’t want to 
be so declarative like that.

136
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You know...I’d rather make something 
that’s very open-ended that like I,

137
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it can have a meaning to me,

138
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but then it also can have a meaning to somebody else can fill it up with their meaning.

139
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Off-camera: Ohhhh!!!
Kiki: Oh, it doesn’t matter.

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Hi! How are you? Good! (OVERLAP)

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I have no innate ability for 
doing things physically and stuff,

142
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so I have to really learn and try to do it.

143
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And, and to me that’s the pleasure in it.

144
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And a friend of mine’s son died,

145
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and I went to a Baptist funeral and 
I’d never been in a Baptist church.

146
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And all the women wore nurse’s uniforms.

147
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All the ushers.

148
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And they stood there with Kleenex boxes.

149
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It was so moving to me to see like god’s nurses,

150
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you know like these women 
there like just with Kleenex.

151
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Like it was so simple and so beautiful.

152
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And I thought about like, like saints,

153
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like little saint sculptures 
or something like that.

154
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Kiki VO: I also to make each one unique.

155
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The more you manipulate it the 
more actual life you put into it.

156
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I think people don’t like it if you say

157
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you don’t have any genetically 
innate ability for making things—

158
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they go, oh no, that’s not true—you do.

159
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People have this fantasy that artists are, like,

160
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creating or having this inspiration all the time

161
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and so for me I think what 
I like about this is work.

162
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You know like ninety percent of 
it is that you have to come here

163
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and file out your bad 
mistakes and stuff like that.

164
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Or it gives you

165
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this enormous freedom in just filing

166
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and doing things like that for hours on end.

167
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Like I always know what to do.

168
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I never have, like I never 
have a moment in my life

169
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when I don’t know what to do.

170
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I always know there’s some filing to do, you know.