Kim Dickey

When seen in an outdoor setting, Kim Dickey’s Mille-fleur suggests a garden wall overgrown with glorious flowering plants. The image resolves from its broad grid of painted and glazed ceramic forms, each a stylized flower or quatrefoil. The floral design is inspired by a sixteenth-century tapestry. Those weavings were an early precursor to the pixelated image—each individual stitch creating its part of the whole.

With its simple geometric shape and aluminum infrastructure, Mille-fleur also recalls the minimal sculptures of artists such as Donald Judd. Onto this simplified box, however, Dickey attaches more than 15,000 handmade ceramic elements, emphasizing the artist’s labor and craft. Each unit is both the same (in shape) and unique (in its painted surface). The work revels in such opposites— minimal and decorative, abstract and floral, architectural and organic. Ultimately, the garden wall occupies the precise boundary between nature and culture, outside and in.