Kim Cridler: Divining art from metal

Think about the power of sentimental attachments: How digging through an old box of possessions, and grasping a cherished teddy bear or baseball hat, can unlock a flood of memories.

To Kim Cridler, an assistant professor of art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the emotional power of objects drives her work as an artist. Through her work in metalsmith arts, Cridler seeks to recreate the feelings that are engendered by those meaningful artifacts or our past.

She views possessions as a story just waiting to be told – and her artwork combines the historical functionality of metal with contemporary art to tell a story.

The source of Cridler’s inspiration comes from her own upbringing. She grew up on a Michigan hog farm in a home that was carpeted with old relatives’ clothes woven together. She says that her great aunt could point to a piece and tell a story about the relative that wore that particular suit coat or trousers.

“She talked about members of our family not so much through photographs, but rather through objects,” Cridler says. “I knew all of these people through things, and so things became paramount to me.”

One of her intense fascinations as a child was with a family heirloom known as a samovar, or Russian teapot. The object so captured her imagination that it influenced her first choice of a college major in Russian languages, then later led her to the field of metalsmith arts.

“Objects have real power,” says Cridler, who joined the UW–Madison art department in 2005. Metals, in particular, have always been a compelling material source for her art.

“People have this perception that metalsmith work, because it’s a specific technical pursuit, is separated from the rest of culture, but it’s not,” she says. “It’s in the trophy cups you win at a race; it’s in the souvenir spoon you pick up at the Grand Canyon and in the wedding bands you buy with your significant other.”

Cridler specializes in hollowware, metal tableware like bowls and pitchers. She says that the process of transforming something so common and so functional into art is “actually very tricky.” The art of metalsmithing requires a delicate balance between understanding the historical use of an object and using that understanding to create contemporary art, Cridler explains.

“Part of our field is still making practical, functional pieces,” she says. “But part of the field is also closely examining our own history and making sort of moving artworks using that material.”

The metals lab, tucked away on the seventh floor of the Humanities Building, is full of work benches, metal scraps and contains a room dedicated to hammers and other hand tools. Just as Eskimos have 20 ways to say “snow,” Cridler says metalsmiths have dozens of ways to use a “hammer,” each one having a very specific purpose.

In her beginning metals course, Cridler assigns her students to create a commemorative cup. She asks her students to create something personally meaningful, but at the same time, use the “well-known vocabulary of form and ornament” to make their statement.

“I want them to look to history to use some of the same tools we’ve established to get their ideas of the ground,” she says.

Jason Noble, a senior studying metals, began his study of metal firmly focused on the process and the quality of craftsmanship, Noble credits Cridler for bringing out the conceptual side of his work.

“Kim got me to think more about what I was going to say and how I was going to get my ideas across,” Noble says. He says that after working so diligently to make purely functional pieces, it was difficult to transition into making contemporary art, but sees merit in both. He recently designed a silver goblet fastened with a lid and straw resembling a plastic fast food cup lid.

Adds Cridler: “It’s so exciting to teach here at the university,” she says. “I’m in a field that’s still involved with making things that are capable of having that kind of power.”

As a professor, Cridler’s goal is to increase awareness of contemporary metalsmith arts. “We have a great opportunity to remind people about the connection they have with the objects in their lives, she says.

In her own pieces, Cridler creates structural skeletons of containment objects like vases and pitchers. She says that she interrupts these intellectual-looking objects with natural, sensual materials like silk, hair and beeswax.

“There’s a voice to these materials that speaks so eloquently about the experience of being human,” Cridler says. She tries to “jump the gap between the experiential and what you think you know about the world.”

Cridler has exhibited her work in museums across the country. This fall, she created an eight-foot tall bronze vase detailed with opaque flowers titled “Bloom” for the Paine Art Center in Oshkosh. This month, she is part of a chandeliers exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan.