Banshee Pearls

"Banshee Pearls" features Kiki Smith’s first depictions of her own likeness in her work. Starting in 1989 at Universal Limited Art Editions, Smith began to play with the idea of incorporating herself into her prints—a practice she consciously avoided in her sculptures. Each of the twelve prints in "Banshee Pearls" is composed of several photographic states of the artist’s face that have been dramatically altered and rendered in both positive and negative registers. Some faces have been photocopied and distorted so fully that the artist’s features are barely recognizable; others appear as crude skull-like masks or ghosts. Smith used dozens of self-portraits in the work, occasionally holding the printing plates upright to create long drips of ink, and once pressed her teeth against the photocopier to transfer the image onto a plate. For Smith, this work was intensely personal. In Irish folklore a banshee is a female spirit who foretells death with a highpitched wail. Smith’s father referred to her as a banshee as a teenager, a moniker she embraced. “There’s something really nice about transgressing your own image,” Smith says about the process. “I made a celebration of being a death figure.”