Taylor Kibby
Los Angeles, CA
Taylor Kibby is a sculptor and ceramicist living and working in Los Angeles, CA.
MessageTaylor Kibby lives and works and Los Angeles, California. She was educated at Bard College, Massachusetts before graduating with an MFA in Applied Craft and Design from Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art and Craft. Kibby is known for her intricate, flowing stoneware sculptures, which are moulded in interlocking links of a remarkable lightness and delicacy, making them resemble woven chains. As seen in the work of Ruth Asawa or Eva Hesse, Kibby’s intricate, flowing abstract sculptures challenge traditional notions of sculpture and solidity, requiring intensive discipline and precision to create. Kibby’s interest in chain links and other permeable barriers is rooted in their potential to reflect the way objects and people occupy space in the world as well as notions of memory, identity and narrative.
Statement
No energy is ever created or destroyed, it simply shifts from one form to another. Through this work I seek ways to apply this belief to the world around me; how do we both give and take space in the same breath. How does the cycle of building and dismantling our sense of self evolve and how can this process engender moments of curiosity and awareness. I want to make space, through material focused exploration, for moments of reflection and discovery.
I explore ideas of memory and narrative in connection with the way objects share space and embody identity. I dive into my own vague and ill-focused memories and seek out symbolic markers with which I build an understanding of who I was and who I am. Like drag fishing in my own past, I hope to unearth a glimpse of a forgotten self. I’m interested in ideas of protection and self-identity: what things do we build up around ourselves to prevent vulnerability and how do those fragile narratives shift and morph over time to maintain their strength. The kinetic movement of this semi-rigid material speaks to the mutable nature of our systems of protection, both the strength of flexibility but also the stretching, drooping, and tears that accompany the constant shifting of identity. A patchwork of links moving together tells the story of a constantly moving shelter that is built both to identify with and protect from the outside world. These sculptures balance dualities like rigid and flexible, hard and soft, to make space between for an unknown.
My work speaks to the craft traditions of the artists labor and touch. Through intensive repetition of movement, and the resulting irregularities that mark the work with my hand’s signature, I am able to create a structure that is just off of center. Each intuitive disruption and un-weaving of the logical structure is the mark of my being impressed into the work. And in the same breath, the piece is a being in its own right and thus with each move I make, the piece reacts and sways to its own internal logic. That is part of the pleasure of the work; we move together in conversation back and forth in search of balance and resolution.