Story

Kiki Smith’s restless, multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. Since the 1970s, her figural representations exploring the female form, mortality, and gender have marked her as one of the most potent commentators on the body as a carrier of meaning and memory. With her 1999 series Blue Prints, Smith extended her intimate examinations of the female body into works based on fairytales and childhood. Story whimsically evokes a narrative through the juxtaposition of its central figures with the accompaniment of limpid music.

Executed in aquatint and drypoint etching, it features two delicate renderings of young girls clad in Victorian dresses and boots, identified by the artist as Cathy and the novelist Emily Brontë. Cathy, based on a protagonist in Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, clutches a bird to her chest, while Emily carries a chain in her gloved right hand, a reference to the author’s poem "The Prisoner," which includes the verse: "the soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain." Such objects might symbolize the tensions of girlhood, with the lifeless bird suggesting fragility and lack of freedom, with the chain representing strength and tenacity.

Constructed from printed and pasted paper, the girls take the form of paper dolls, further emphasizing a link to childhood play. They are propped onto an acrylic support containing motion-triggered sound components: when a viewer approaches the work, a piece of music composed by Margaret de Wys activates the sculpture.