It is well-recognized that intrinsic to the artistic experience is the almost obsessive quest of artists to study the force that drives us all: the natural world and its transformative state. The brilliant Andy Goldsworthy—whose environmental art is intimately tied to nature, in which each work is a tribute to and a culmination of life’s ever-present cycling of the process of birth, growth, decay, and death—is a sublime example of perfect, absolute truth in one’s work. “I have become aware,” he has stated, “of how nature is in a state of change, and how that change is the key to understanding.”

With their works artists freely range through their own imaginative territories, exploring new forms, looking for new modes of expression, and for new ideas in the development and enrichment of their artforms. The longtime professional artists continue to plunge deeply into the recurring themes of their repertoire, built over years of work, delving into aspects of a bold statement or a subtle nuance with a steady, sure focus that will consequently change their work once more.

In her most recent body of art, originally mounted at the Chicago Cultural Center and now showing at the Palo Alto Art Center, Kiff Slemmons contacted eighteen fellow jewelers with what she termed a “curious and strange” proposal. “Would you be willing to give me a broken, incomplete or inconclusive fragment of yours.... I would set out to ‘fix it,’ which could involve many possibilities but would end up in a finished piece of jewelry.” As evidenced by the exhibition, her requests resulted in twenty-nine pieces of finished work, each housed in a handmade paper reliquary; photographs of the original fragments before being subsumed into her jewelry; and original works by the eighteen fragment-submitting artists.

Initially, Slemmons was wrestling with the idea of perfection in craft, she says, and the importance of imperfection in art in general. “For someone who has perfectionist tendencies it is not necessarily easy to trust imperfection,” she wrote in the letter to her colleagues. “One aspect of trying to understand flaws is to look at both the physical and philosophical aspects of repair. In our throwaway culture, repair is not necessarily highly regarded as a means of solving problems. Better to throw away than to fix. But more is thrown away than meets the eye. What is also lost is what can be learned from trying to fix something, and the satisfaction of rendering it useable or refreshing it in some way.”

For professional jewelry artists, like Slemmons, symbol and metaphor combine with technique and medium as artists explore the body as a natural and important canvas for aesthetic expression. They have a deep, rich alliance with ideation and expression, such as when Slemmons thoughtfully considers the duality of perfection and imperfection; and concomitant notions of repair, which are in a metaphorical sense also about healing and making whole, activities performed both by gods and humans manifesting the perfect and imperfect. They are also aided by both an informed technical methodology and the long, involved experience of working with materials. And it is this intricate combination of the concrete with the amorphous that brings an artwork successfully into fruition. If one exists without the other, something fundamental is lacking. Even though the piece itself assumes a physical presence, it will not succeed meaningfully as art.

In this irresistible, intriguing body of jewelry, sometimes minimalist and ascetic, sometimes extravagant, sometimes imbued with a longing for contact and community, Slemmons works through her particular imaginative territory, based on the forces and foundations of her own professional and personal experiences. She has not channeled the aesthetic of her comrades or if she has, Slemmons has re-channeled them into works of great individuality and integrity that could only have been created by her. These works are an astonishing tour de force and from an artist who has consistently pushed herself to greater aesthetic and technical challenges over thirty years of creative life.

Change is the muse and the mantra by which artistic understanding is possible if it is to take place at all. The genius of Kiff Slemmons is the degree to which she has absorbed just how much change is the key to it all—that crucial unbreaking link between nature and understanding. And time after time, over many decades, she has reached perfect, absolute truth, or understanding, in her penetrating and decisive jewelry art. Artists are the recognizable ambivalences by which we live, they point to our potential and our perfections. They perform for us what we cannot do for ourselves. With each artistic action, the possibility is renewed that even one individual’s unique perception can alter our ignorant course and our human state will become much more what we all hunger and desire; that is, to hold the key to understanding. Kiff Slemmons holds out to us that key in Re-Pair & Imperfection. Photographs by Rod Slemmons.

The Palo Alto Art Center hosts
Kiff Slemmons: Re:Pair & Imperfection
through December 22, 2006.
The Center is located at 1313 Newell Road, Palo Alto, California 94303; telephone 650.329.2366.
A catalog accompanies the exhibition.