Taylor Kibby

Taylor Kibby (b. 1992) lives and works and Los Angeles, California. She was educated at Bard College, Massachusetts before graduating with an MFA in Applied Craft and Design from Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art and Craft. Kibby is known for her intricate, flowing stoneware sculptures, which are moulded in interlocking links of a remarkable lightness and delicacy, making them resemble woven chains. As seen in the work of Ruth Asawa or Eva Hesse, Kibby’s intricate, flowing abstract sculptures challenge traditional notions of sculpture and solidity, requiring intensive discipline and precision to create. Kibby’s interest in chain links is rooted in their potential to reflect the way objects and people occupy space in the world as well as notions of memory, identity and narrative.

Embodying a range of dualities, Kibby’s sculptures are both hard and soft, rigid and flexible, static though they appear to be in the midst of motion. These contradictory qualities are influenced by her impressions of the contrasts of the California landscape, with its balance between verdant lushness and harsh desert, as well as her interest in the paradoxical nature of personal identity. For Kibby, the stretching, drooping and tears in her sculptures reflects the way we adapt to emotional wounds, rebuilding our narratives of identity to maintain their strength over time.

Kibby builds her sculptures with a meditative precision, sometimes unweaving structures and breaking the line of her chain links periodically with abstract forms or ‘interruptions’. ‘Every time I hang a sculpture, it’s different. The element of chance and not knowing where it will finish gives me freedom, and allows it to be born into something I could have never imagined it being,’ Kibby says. ‘What’s great about something that moves on its own is that I can break things, unweave structures and add structures, but I will never know how it turns out. It’s exciting.’

For Kibby, the chain is a physical manifestation of the body and the way we occupy space, moving through the world and meeting thousands of people without ever questioning the essential solidity of our selves in the universes. This notion of space carries over into Kibby’s interest in the way the past binds to us, taking up space in our shared imagination despite its physical disappearance. ‘The past only exists in our present, and we are constantly pulling the past into our present to create our own identities,’ Kibby explains.

Kibby has been featured in group exhibitions at NonFinito Gallery, New York (2019); A-B Projects, Los Angeles (2019); Emma Scully Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Jorge Mendez Gallery, Palm Springs (2018) and Furthermore Gallery, Portland (2017). Her work is held in various significant private collections internationally and in the public collection of the Santa Monica Proper Hotel, Los Angeles.