Kiki Smith Shares a Glimpse Into Her World, in Photographs

The line between the artist Kiki Smith’s work and home life has always been faint, if it ever existed at all. She grew up in a large Victorian house in South Orange, N.J., in a family of artists — her father was the sculptor Tony Smith, her mother, Jane Lawrence Smith, was an opera singer and actor, and her sister Seton is also an artist — and throughout her four-decade career, she has often explored domesticity in her work. Take, for example, her 2005 installation “Homespun Tales. Stories of Domestic Occupation,” for which she arranged vignettes of porcelain sculptures, found furniture and photographs of her family around a 16th-century palazzo in Venice. She has also, for several decades, photographed the interiors of her own homes — an 18th-century farmhouse in New York’s Hudson Valley and a 19th-century townhouse in the East Village — capturing her ever-changing assortment of personal treasures and artworks (many of them gifts from friends). “Your house is like a shrine,” she told T recently. “You’re placing things there on purpose, so they build up energy or meaning or connections.”

Ahead of her latest solo show, “Murmur,” which opens tomorrow at Pace Gallery in New York, we sent Smith an instant camera and asked her to capture scenes from her life. Her images below range from a snapshot of a mushroom growing near her house upstate to photographs of works in her home by the artists Helmut Dorner and Ursula von Rydingsvard. Smith, who first started experimenting with instant cameras in the ’60s and ’70s (“they were a very exciting possibility then,” she says) also uses the images as a drawing surface, animating them with her own evocative handmade marks and scribbles. “If you don’t want something in a picture,” she says, “you can just paint it out.”