Reflections on the sculptures of Anna Kiff

Rebecca Morrill on Anna's Mile End Show, May 2017

While formal terms, Anna Kiff’s sculptures range from abstract to anthropomorphic – straight-forwardly figurative statuettes these are not – each of them has appears to have its own very specific character, making it hard not project a personality onto them. Some are cheerful and friendly, while others seem ominous, or threatening even. Some are serious and austere, whereas others look flippant, with comically large feet or more than one penis, as though they’re mocking their very existence as works of ‘high art’.

These shapes have their origins in one or more of the numerous drawings Kiff makes each day – curvilinear lines that more often than not, lead nowhere beyond the sketchbook page, but just occasionally spark the idea for a three-dimensional form. The final shape of each work, however, is reached during the process of making. She feels the form, letting its contours emerge in her hands as she works. It’s as if these creatures lead her to create them. Working on multiple pieces at once, she sometimes reaches a kind of ‘maker’s block’, where the direction that the form should take no longer clearly reveals itself. She might have to put a half-made work to one side for weeks, sometimes months, letting it mull in the back of her mind until the way to bring it to completion becomes clear.

Kiff’s means of creating sculptures is driven in part by a curiosity about materials, and the potential of their properties. She started working in modelling wax during her studies at Central St Martins, London, intrigued about the possibilities wax offered both as a solid mass that she could soften and mould into shapes, and as a substance that could also be pushed and pressed into a thin layer and smoothed over other shapes (made in copper mesh and scrim), like a translucent skin. To vary their colours, she initially experimented with adding pigments, massaging oil paint directly into the wax, however most of her works to date are simply the existing colour of the wax: black or honey-coloured. More recently, she has added colour onto the surface of works, combining Plextol with acrylic paint, and she also varies the hues of the small wooden plinths on which many of the sculptures are presented.

These plinths are not simply a practical means of displaying the work, for Kiff plays with the relationship between biomorphic form and geometric block, positioning the former in precarious poses that both animate these characters and challenge the viewer’s understanding of gravity and balance. She sometimes adds heaviness to the otherwise lightweight objects in the form of lead shot to kept it stable - either secretly concealing it inside the base of the hollow form, or embedding in the wax surface itself, so it appears like a kind of lumpy, black rash just beneath the surface. The finished appearance of the sculptures is multifarious. Not all are covered in wax: some reach completion with the gauze substrate as surface, a rough and porous skin to contrast the smooth sheen of their wax-covered siblings.

The artistic influences Kiff cites in reference to her own practice reveal a substantial engagement with art history: in formal terms, its clear to see connections with the sculptural works of Louise Bourgeois, Joan Miró or with Franz West’s Adaptives. She also engages with painting, including the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, whose depictions of figures (and especially of women) similarly hover between representation and abstraction, between horror and humour.

My first response, however, on seeing Kiff’s work was to think of Maria Lassnig, the Viennese artist known for her semi-figurative ‘body-awareness’ paintings, who died in 2014 aged 94, who (like many women artists of her generation) only received widespread international acclaim in the latter decades of her life. Lassnig struggled right to the end of her life with the challenge of representing not how something looked externally, but how she felt from within her own body. Indeed, she once insisted, for an interview with Frieze Magazine, that a postscript be added if it was to be published, stating “Unfortunately, in this interview I have not managed properly to express and distinguish between my twin points of departure – inner body awareness and the contrasting retinal view of my body, the external view, as these are oppositional.” Kiff’s sculptures – for all their individuality and autonomy – seem to me to reveal something of the inner awareness of their maker: sometimes cheerful, sometimes ominous, sometimes serious, sometimes flippant. A cast of characteristics that make up a complex, ever-changing whole.

Rebecca Morrill is Senior Editor (Art), at Phaidon Press, and a contemporary art writer and curator.