Kim Soares

As a child I was a modern day hunter/gatherer of magical bits and pieces of this earth. Inside every rock and shell I would see a universe. I would come home from school each day with my lunchbox full of the days’ treasures. Feathers, bones, dried insects – on a particularly wonderful day a petrified lizard – would all end up lovingly arranged on my shelves and windowsills. I spent hours touching and playing with them every day.

As I grew older and moved farther away from the Earth and more into the World, these touchstones ended up being boxed and stored away along with my innocence and belief in the magic of such things.

Many years later during a time of great struggle and disconnection in my life, I started having amazing dreams that were always punctuated by the appearance of an old woman just outside of my vision. The only part of her that I ever saw was her hand, finger pointing towards one thing or another in my dream.

She would say “This is the thing that is important. This is the thing you must remember.”

I would often be caught up in everything else that was going on in my dream and just say “okay” but not pay attention. She would keep bringing my awareness back to the thing she was pointing to until I really saw it.
It was always something of nature-a tree with a deep dark hole in the trunk, an egg with a snake wrapped around it.

I started to pay attention in my waking life to the signs that were all around me. Little by little my lunchbox again started filling up with bits and pieces of magic. Once again, rocks had personalities, bones could talk, everything had a spirit… a story… a voice.

My studio now resembles an archeological dig comprised of fabrics, beads, bones, feathers, bits of fur, dried insects, skulls, shells, stones and dried foliage. For the past 15 years I have been making ceremonial art and leather journals -weaving these discarded and forgotten things of nature into tools for people to use to reclaim those forgotten and discarded parts of themselves.

This past year I have been inspired to honor the Grandmother of my dreams as well as the Grandmother of us all who in her numerous manifestations, has danced at the very heart of time and is our pathway back home. With each piece I celebrate the sacredness of life, death and continuance.

Ideally, I'd like the viewer to have an immediate visceral response to my work, even if it's not immediately understood, and to leave with some sense of primordial connection to everything and everyone on this planet.

Description of My Work and How I Create it:

The bases of the wall hangings are made of stretched deerhide on canvas of varying sizes. The subject is then assembled out of sculpted deerhide, bones, feathers, shells, beads, skulls(real or resin),crystals, moss, seaweed ….whatever is needed to tell the story.

The grandmother figures are fashioned by making a plaster body around a wire armature to which I attach a skull (real or resin).I sculpt the hands out of polymer clay and then attach them to the piece. I then fold and sculpt deerhide around to suggest clothing. After that I add wool ,beads ,feathers, rocks, or whatever else I feel the piece requires. Everything is adhered with glue or hand stitching.