Elizabeth King

Elizabeth King, Pupil, porcelain, glass eyes, carved wood, brass; half life-size, dimensions vary: all joints movable; 1987–90. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Elizabeth King is an American sculptor and writer known for movable figurative sculptures that she has employed in stop-frame animations. Her work combines exacting handcraft, elementary mechanics, and digital and electronic technologies, applied in sculptures of half or full figures (generally scaled at half life-size), heads, arms and hands, or even simply eyes. She often equips figures with subtly illuminated eyes and visible and invisible mechanisms enabling the performance of anatomically correct simple operations, seemingly of their own volition. Writers have described her figures as "insistently nonhuman" yet "uncannily alive" in their ability to project self-awareness, intelligence, agency and emotion. They reflect her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and puppet, literature involving unnatural figures come to life, and human movement. Art in America critic Leah Ollman wrote that King's "highly articulated automatons invite us to consider how consciousness arises from physical being … she portrays her mechanical surrogates as convincingly self-aware, while we are left to ponder that age-old question: where exactly does the self reside?" She has exhibited in diverse venues ranging from commercial galleries and museums such as MASS MoCA and MAK (Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna) to the San Francisco Exploratorium and the American Psychiatric Association annual conference. Her work belongs to public art collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Hirshhorn Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Education and early career King was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1950 and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, earning BFA (1972) and MFA (1973) degrees in sculpture. She began attracting attention in the 1970s for theatrical, tableau-like works in exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center, Oakland Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Hansen-Fuller Gallery, among others. This work combined found materials and crafted objects and employed marionette-style puppets (often caricature-like heads attached to jointed, skeletal bodies), kinetic and participatory elements, and narrative. Reviews compared them to early 20th-century musée mécanique (penny arcade games)—toylike in operation and scale, yet involving themes of pain and isolation, as well as wonder at the workings of the human body. For example, Theater (1972–3) involved a hinged wooden box attached to a chair that closed around a viewer's head and contained a mechanized, miniature theater "set" with a puppet of an old woman; it suggested a metaphor for interiority (being "inside one's head") or the notion of the "Cartesian theater"—the brain as a private chamber occupied by a homunculus. In her art, King had turned almost exclusively to figurative sculptures by the 1980s, producing intimately scaled works that she gradually refined by perfecting traditional crafts such as carving, modeling, casting bronze, firing porcelain, woodworking and glass-eye-making. In these works modeled on herself and female relatives (e.g., Portrait of M, 1983), she incorporated an increasing level of realism and a more fully articulated range of movement recalling 18th-century automata rather than dolls or puppets. One of these works, the half-figure Pupil (1987–90), would continue to appear in several later installation, animation and photographic works.

Later works and exhibitions Beginning in the 1990s, King received wider recognition for meticulous figurative sculptures (of jointed full figures, heads, hands, arms, an isolated eye) exhibited with a greater emphasis on gesture, movement, and in presentation, on illusion and stagecraft. The notion of an inexhaustible range of poses complicates the status of her sculptures, implying a past and future, while also situating them in an indeterminate place between object or statue and robot. Their operations can involve hidden spring-loaded elements, magnets, pendulums and fiber optics, and visible hinged doors and exposed joints that intentionally break with illusionism. These elements especially came into play when she began to "cast" her figures in photographic series and stop-frame animations involving painstaking pose adjustments in which they performed self-reflexive movements or simple tasks. These subtle, involuntary gestures—attuned to slight shifts in the tilt of the head or the touching of fingers, which can variously signal cognition, introspection, suspicion, or resignation, for example—often revealed ways the body unconsciously responds when the mind is active.

Critics suggest that King's co-presentation of work across media—and the resulting discrepancies in scale, substance and identification—create a sense of uncertainty and uncanniness that blurs perceptual boundaries between actual and virtual object, illusion and reality, human and non-human. Her exhibition "Radical Small" at MASS MoCA (2017) paired large-scale projected animation side-by-side with the small-scale sculpture used to make it, while introducing a new, live filmmaking component in the gallery as its centerpiece. King worked in front of viewers with stop-motion animator Mike Belzer on a custom-built, vibration-free platform stage for seven days, painstakingly setting in motion a pair of jointed boxwood hands through a series of changing poses.

Writing King has written extensively about automatons and other concerns related to her art. Leah Ollman described her book, Attention’s Loop (A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit) (1999), as an intellectual, sensual and practical chronicle of the conception and creation of her work that "braids together philosophical and phenomenological musings with anecdotes, childhood memories, studio notes, fairy tales and legends." Her sculpture Pupil is the book's main visual subject, depicted in photographs by Katherine Wetzel that explore representation and deception, and artificial and human. The book's main subject is a 16", carved automaton in the Smithsonian Institution collection commonly known as "The Monk"—according to legend, a depiction of the Spanish Franciscan friar and saint Diego de Alcalá, whose preserved remains were allegedly involved in a miracle at the court of Phillip II of Spain. The figure has been attributed to the workshop of the clockmaker Juanelo Turriano; when wound, it walks a slow seven-point path, prays and waves a cross, beats its chest, shifts its gaze and lifts the cross to its lips to kiss it.

Recognition King has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002) Harvard Radcliffe Institute (1996), Virginia Commission for the Arts (1996), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1988). She has also received artist residencies from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2017) and Dartmouth College (2008). In 2017, she was elected a member of the National Academy of Design. She is the subject of a documentary film, Double Take: The Art of Elizabeth King (2018), directed by Olympia Stone.

King's work belongs to the public collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as well as to institutional and university collections.