Kim Dickey
Parterre
Originally commissioned for the Great Hall of the Jeppesen Terminal in Denver, Parterre is a sculpture featuring over 12,000 hand-painted terra-cotta quatrefoil mounted on nine connected panels made of aluminum. Measuring fifteen feet by fifteen feet, Kim Dickey has created an aerial view of an enormous formal landscape that subtly incorporates the language of airports and airfields.
Parterre provides a suspended moment in the form of a holding pattern, that, in turn, allows people to pause and reflect on where they are and where they hope to go. Referencing a formal garden found in an 18th c. landscape architectural drawing, it features a circular maze with a central fountain being fed by four sources of water. The structure is minimal in its overall shape appearing as a floating slab of a green hedge-like material with a rich palette of color and texture cladding the form, providing a tactile and lushly glazed surface to contemplate.
Parterre explores ideas about elsewhere suggested by forms reminiscent of gardens and art historical sculpture, while examining the boundaries between interior and exterior landscapes, and the desire to travel to places that exist in ones’ imagination.
About Kim Dickey
Artist Kim Dickey explores how we construct environments both physically and psychologically while in response to what is natural vs. cultural, interior vs. exterior. The artist’s intensely assembled, terracotta-clad aluminum sculptures and ceramic works consist of many thousands of unique, yet seemingly uniform elements. Using gardens as her reference, Dickey freely reinterprets decorative ceramic traditions such as bocage: the closely clustered, miniature flowers traditionally used in the Rococo. Dickey’s theatrical sensibility and historically inspired forms, position her sculpture in the in-between space of presence and absence, the real and the ideal, while mirroring past cultures and the natural world.
Growing up in New York, Dickey was surrounded by art and often explored the many museums throughout the city. After studying at two renown art colleges, she began her career as an artist and instructor teaching ceramics at numerous institutions, among them Hunter College, NYU, Bennington College, UCLA, The Dalton School, and as the Director of Greenwich House Pottery for four years, a nearly 100-year-old art school and gallery in Greeniwch Village. In 1999 Dickey accepted a professorship at the University of Colorado-Boulder where she continues to be an integral part of their highly respected Arts Practices program.
Dickey’s work has been featured in solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Aspen and Denver with galleries such as Garth Clark, Jack Tilton, Pierogi, White Columns, Harvey Meadows, and Sherry Leedy, and at many museums throughout the world. Dickey’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Her work also graces many private and corporate collections. Dickey is represented by Robischon Gallery in Denver, Colorado.
Dickey received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design and her Master of Fine Arts from the prestigious New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.
