Divining modern art from ancient metalsmith techniques

To Kim Cridler, an assistant professor of art, 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 the meaningful artifacts of 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 rugs woven from clothing once worn by family members. Her great aunt could point to a piece and tell a story about the relative who 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 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 metal tableware such as bowls and pitchers. She says the process of transforming something so common and functional into art is “actually very tricky,” requiring a delicate balance between understanding the historical use of an object and using that understanding to create contemporary art.

“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.”

Above all, Cridler stresses the importance of craftsmanship, saying that talent is a limited road.

“Craftsmanship, at some point, is how you articulate your ideas,” she says. “It’s about intention, persistence and discipline, and I value that so highly over talent.”

The metals lab, tucked away on the seventh floor of the Mosse Humanities Building, is full of work benches and metal scraps, and it has a room dedicated to hammers and other hand tools. Metalsmiths have dozens of ways to use a “hammer,” each has a specific purpose.

In the beginning metals course she teaches, Cridler has her students create a commemorative cup. She asks them to create something personally meaningful but also 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 off the ground,” she says.

But before taking up tools, Cridler’s students learn to appreciate craftsmanship with a “good old sheet of sandpaper.” Students will actually sand through their fingertips, an incredibly painful experience.

“Right away, they realize that even though we’re making small-scale objects, it has a profound physical impact,” she says. “You really end up learning this relationship between what you desire to do in your mind and what you can physically do with your hands.”

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 he sees merit in both. He recently designed a silver goblet fastened with a lid and straw resembling a plastic cup lid.

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

As an educator, 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 work, Cridler creates structural skeletons of containment objects like vases and pitchers. She interrupts these intellectual-looking objects with natural, sensual materials such as 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 8-foot-tall bronze vase detailed with opaque flowers for the Paine Art Center in Oshkosh, Wis. She is currently part of an exhibit of chandeliers at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis.