Kim Radochia
Patterns, Movement, Mediums, Messages
By Chris Munkholm
Riprap, Stainless steel, 7’ x 28’ x 14’, 2004
The COSMOS feature artist this month is Kim Radochia, currently showing at the Matthew Swift Gallery exhibition, Dirven 2 Abstraxion. Sometimes a childhood perfectly prepares – and even predicts – the future calling of an artist’s life work. Kim’s youth in rustic New England became her scientific and artistic studio of curiosity. She was fascinated with all the forms, minutiae, and movements of the natural world:
“I was always manipulating my samples, altering them so that I could learn about form and space through my sense of touch. I edited everything that I picked up down to its many pieces and parts. A leaf became just the veins held by the stem.”
Kim took this intensely investigative mindset into the world she entered as an artist. Perhaps because of her sense of the outdoors as a place of natural sculpture, she came to recognize the power of public artwork to express important ideas and to collaborate and gather community in a positive way. Her first public sculpture was a student collaboration in 1991, titled Innocent Voices, exhibited at the Aidekman Art Center at Tufts University, created for International AIDS Awareness Day.
As her expertise in large sculptural works increased, she was invited in 2004 to participate in a group show, In and By the River, at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Her piece, Riprap, is a rippling sculpture made from twenty bands of polished stainless steel, inspired by the water currents of the Housatonic River and the reflective surfaces of water. The metal bands mirror the surrounding environment.
(left) Currents, Appleton Mills, Lowell, MA, 2011. Photo credit: Christopher Navin.
(right) She Rocks, participatory sculptural installation, 500+ Cast Rocks, West Branch Gallery, 2019. Photo credit: Gordon Miller.
Kim’s creation of large sculpture in public art programs and exhibitions continued for the next 15 years, with important permanent commissions and partnerships with prominent galleries, including an atrium installation at Lowell Massachusetts’s Appleton Mills project. In 2016 she installed ‘AB’, a kinetic, highly polished metal sculpture representing molecules in the human body called antigen binding sites, for the bioscience company Cell Signaling Technology, Beverly, MA.
From Large Sculpted Metal to Shimms of Shaped Paper and She Rocks
At a crux in her career, she entered a period of reevaluation, with the need to simplify and focus inward. Kim gave herself a new challenge with a pledge to make art for one year, using one simple material in her studio: white paper. And thus began a period of wild but concentrated experimentation, which led to her invention of Shimms. The Shimms process uses hand torn paper to create a sculptural wall relief, with the intricate paper assemblage forming abstractions of movement, light, color, and pattern. But once again, Kim scaled the process to a large format, moving to the creation of large panels with upwards of 25,000 pieces of paper.
At this time of redirection Kim created another significant project, “She Rocks,” which had its inaugural launch in the Netherlands. For this installation honoring women, Kim cast 500+ pulp rocks into which the public participants could enter the name of an admired women and descriptive adjective.
The Heart in the Haystack on Cape Ann Museum Green
Heart in the Haystack, salt meadow cordgrass and branching, 10’ x 8’ x 10’, Cape Ann Museum Green, 2020. Photo credit: Kathy Chapman.
This last summer the Cape Ann Museum Green opened, with its magnificent near four acres of grounds, intended to eventually become a sculpture park. Kim was invited to contribute a sculpture for the opening event. She created Heart in the Haystack because “Historically, the salt marsh haystack was a structure made to store nutritious food for working animals. Here I reinterpreted this historical form as an interactive experience to learn about native plants, the creatures that rely on them for food, and how they are specially adapted to help us fight climate change.”
What a perfect integration of hallmarks in her artistic journey. One can see her original youthful connection with nature, and intense concern for the environment. The Haystack project for the CAM Green was a public sculpture. The pieces of hay used to form the structure have an uncanny resemblance to the paper Shimm pieces. The public was involved, as invited to leave with a small native plant to add to their garden or yard: a small step in creating habitat and helping the environment.
One wonders what direction this fascinating journey will forge next. Kim is becoming her own force of nature.
Kim’s work can be viewed currently at the Matthew Swift Gallery in a group show titled, Dirven 2 Abstraxion until January 17, 2022. Information: matthewswiftgallery.com.
“Shimms”
Kim Radochia, Artist Statement
Much of my work is a meditation on movement in nature, whether it be the circular weave of a bird’s nest, the dance of smoke, or, in this most recent body of work, Shimms, the undulation of water. My conceptual preoccupation is with the study of ‘Li,’ an ancient Chinese practice of gathering and organizing the extraordinary patterns found in nature on every scale. Water currents and water lines, patterns of flocking birds called murmurations, and geological formations collect and disperse on these worked surfaces.
Shimms are paper and acrylic pieces in which the process of creating the work, the painting and tearing of paper and then the fixing of each shred onto the surface, reflects actual movement the piece creates. The slow, steady ritual of making this recent body of work has also become a symbol of my energy and endurance for the past eight years. My method of making these dimensional artworks was discovered through trial and error with the goal of pushing one simple material in my studio, paper.
As the viewer travels the visual arc that the artwork occupies the static artwork becomes kinetic. This emersion allows you to participate as directly as possible in the work and by circumstance in the revelation of nature’s identities.
