Biography

Kim Matthews makes nonobjective sculpture and drawings in various media, emphasizing process and materiality as a means to engage viewers in reflection. The recipient of a 2010–2011 Jerome Fiber Artist Project Grant, Ms. Matthews exhibits in nonprofit and commercial venues throughout the U.S. In 2017, she participated in her first international exhibition in Ukraine. Her work is featured in Lark Books’ 500 Paper Objects and Artistry in Fiber, Volume II: Sculpture, published by Schiffer. Ms. Matthews was born in Anchorage, Alaska, grew up and attended college in Maine, and has been living in Minneapolis, Minnesota since 1984.

Statement

I experience artmaking as a discipline of devotion that is complementary to a long-term daily meditation practice. I deploy a handmade geometry and tactile surfaces to otherwise simple, serially based forms to engage viewers in intimate, close looking.

My sculptural objects are often surfaced in saturated colors and drawn patterns, evoking personal formative experiences of the popular-culture design objects of the 1960s and 70s, which inspired a desire to make domestic, exuberant art to be lived with and loved as companions. Whether I’m working with more organic or geometric forms in 2D or 3D, at the basis of my work is an ethos of art as service.

In recent years I’ve been considering Minimalism, post-Minimalism, and post-painterly abstraction in addition to the Tantric and Neo-Tantric meditation drawings and paintings of India that have inspiring me for years.