Kim Smith Claudel

Kim Smith Claudel is an interdisciplinary artist currently living in Portland, OR. Her work intersects painting, sculpture, and performance while using a variety of natural, discarded, and technological media—often created within limitations or rule sets. Her work has recently been shown in Japan, Sweden, and across the US. She is a member of WAVE Contemporary artist collective as well as Carnation Contemporary Gallery. She received an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts.


Artist Statement

My creative practice is one of discovery, experiment, and play. I seek and highlight the moments along the creative process in which gestures of physical forces (gravity / entropy / time) intersect with the ephemeral magic of being (consciousness / intuition / wordless poetry).

Formally, the artwork I create intersects painting, sculpture, performance, and installation while using a variety of natural, discarded, and technological media. Conceptually, my work uses the art object with its experiential presence as a material form to represent the otherwise unnameable. I want to create a space of slowing, of noticing, and connecting—to create work that reveals itself through time and unfolds as it expands.

I think of my work as a theater set, a backdrop, a framework that seeks to enable the mind to wander, to discover, to feel. A context for another’s experiences that intersect my own: the personal that is distilled and abstracted, humbly presented through that which material forms can carry. My practice is rooted in ritual, a sacred space to find and reveal that which is outside of ourselves, which connects us, and also escapes our limits of language.


www.kimsmithclaudel.com