After making a number of prints that included depictions of various parts of her own body, such as Untitled, Kiki Smith became interested in creating a picture that showed skin as a flat image. To create My Blue Lake, Smith used a special camera, one of only three in the world. Originally designed for use in geological surveys, the camera has the ability to produce a 360º image. Smith spent a week at the British Museum in London being photographed on a rotating table, and the made the resulting a large-scale negative into a photogravure printing plate. Smith added marks during the lithography process and hand-colored the images as they emerged from the press. The print, with its red and blue fields of color, reveals an extraordinary self-portrait in which Smith’s body becomes a lake surrounded by a tangled landscape of her own hair.

Label from One Another: Spiderlike, I Spin Mirrors, March 7–June 1, 2014