More than just guts

`I think sometimes people get the idea that I'm in the blood and guts business . . ." says Kiki Smith, in the sort of high-pitched, stretched out Emo Philips-like drawl that might make such a misconception forgivable. Even if the New York artist is quick to refute the charge, you can see their point, these people who conceive of Smith's art as an almost forensic project. For her first show to attract major attention, Smith created an installation at New York's Museum of Modern Art featuring 12 mirrored glass flasks, each labelled in an etched Gothic typeface. According to these labels, the flasks contained blood, saliva, vomit and various other bodily fluids. The following year Smith offered audiences a pair of realistic wax human effigies, one a female figure with a milk-like substance emanating from its breast, the other a male with something similar spurting from its penis.

Many of Smith's early drawings were based on the illustrations in Gray's Anatomy and she has produced sculpture featuring internal organs, including a model of a uterus with a hinged door. If that were not enough to make any misapprehension forgivable, the artist has even (though perhaps not simply as part of her sentimental education) spent time training for work in New York's emergency care service.

Smith's biography contains any number of such apparent side steps. Although she is the daughter of Tony Smith, the minimalist sculptor, there was never any certainty that she would become involved with fine art. Her early attraction was to performance. At one time in the 1970s, she lived with the art punk band, The Tubes. Later, under the influence of the Bread and Puppet Theatre, she formed a touring puppet company.

Smith arrived in New York when she was 24 and worked for some time with the guerrilla art group, Colab. She first came to real prominence with the Whitney Biennale of 1991. The show was seen as a broom sweeping out the dusty past of the New York art world and introducing a number of soon-to-be-major figures from (in theory) marginalised groups. The careers of artists such as Janine Antoni enjoyed an enormous boost from the show, and for Smith too it represented a significant increase in the level of attention her work received.

Until that year, Smith felt she was working in an area of art that was simply not of interest to the mainstream American art world. "Figurative art just didn't happen to be in fashion. Ever since abstract expressionism, American art had a problem with the figure. Sure there was performance and body art; and there was work from people like George Segal and Warhol. But American art had just not got around to reconfiguring the figure." Smith was hardly alone in attempting to redress the balance, but her work has been among the most influential. In Ireland alone, it is possible to trace a strong Smith influence in a number of major artists, including Alice Maher, Kathy Prendergast and Dorothy Cross. Her influence has not always, of course, been in terms of subject matter. Indeed, Smith is at least as well known for her choice of media - which has included wool, cotton, wax, glass, embroidery and hair - as for the forms into which she bends them.

For her exhibition at IMMA, which includes examples of her work from 1988 to the present, Smith has organised her work according to colour, an unusual approach for her. "I have difficulty thinking about colour because it's so arbitrary. What I am usually interested in doing is working with a certain material; the colour is secondary."

In transforming these materials, Smith often uses antiquated - or at least little used - technologies. She denies, however, that these choices originate in any technophobia.

"If I use certain techniques, it is often simply because there was something appealing in their limpness. I was interested in the way things had been made because people didn't use those techniques anymore," she says. "It is not that I'm anti-technology. In fact, I think it is one of the few things humans have: besides the desire to reproduce, they have creativity and a desire to make technology."

As if to disprove her hostility towards technology, Smith has recently made her first video works. These feature the photographs first used by Muybridge to analyse motion in animals and man. "I think this century was about deconstruction, including the deconstruction of movement. Through this deconstruction things became fragmented, lost their wholeness. The videos kind of put it back together again."

Part of the reason she has begun to do some video work has been the influence of her students. She has recently spent time teaching in Germany. (Smith was born in Nuremberg, Germany, when her parents stayed there as part of a European sejour that also included a six-month stay in Dublin.)

During her time spent in German art schools, Smith became aware of the (to her) surprising way in which her students used video in their art "as though it were the most natural thing in the world . . . it is the business of the younger generation, I suppose, to take for granted everything that my generation had to struggle with. They see much faster. They are much more influenced by television. They have a totally different set of cultural references."

This should put them somewhat at odds with Smith, who for a New York Times profile last year gave a journalist a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, zipping through the corridors dispensing wisdom about 17th-century Mogul tapestries and ancient Egyptian sculpture. Can she see any hierarchical gap between that and an intimate knowledge of repetitive plot elements in The Brady Bunch? "Not really. It's just a cultural frame of reference."

Smith's new New York show is centred on the artist's drawings of various dead birds she has found. This is not the first time she has tackled the subject; indeed, Jersey Crows, one of her most striking works, was an installation of sculptures of crash-landed crows, splayed in the awkward postures of sudden death.

"That was really about my home state, where one day, because of a chemical release of some sorts, a great flock of crows suddenly fell out of the air, dead. I think it relates to a sort of backwards creation. Like on the fourth day, there will be the destruction of the birds."

So Kiki Smith is clearly not sitting at her Manhattan apartment widow, gazing past her legendary cage of tweeting finches and cooing doves, at a bright, hopeful future? "A friend of mine said recently the people who start thinking about this millennial stuff are lost. And I looked at my new work and thought: that must mean me."

Smith seems prepared to meet the challenge head on. Explaining the new importance of grim environmental commentary in her work, she suggests that throughout her career she has been slowly moving away from her own personal concerns, emerging, as she puts it herself, towards a concern for the outside world.

"A great deal of art is about formal investigation. Or about a marriage of that and the personal necessity of self-expression. You can't just ooze yourself out all over the place," says Smith. But when reminded that she recently told a journalist that that was exactly what she wanted to do, she laughs and modifies her statement slightly. "Well, I suppose I want to ooze in an orderly fashion."

Kiki Smith's exhibition at IMMA, Convergence, opens to the public tomorrow

Smith will give a talk on her work at the Crawford Gallery, Cork on Sunday at 12 p.m.