Melbourne artist Kathy Temin made Christmas decorations for Kim & Kanye

Kim and Kanye commissioned this Melbourne artist to create a decorative fantasy forest consisting of 64 white treelike forms made of synthetic fur.

Kathy Temin, The Memorial Project: Black Wall (section 2), 2015. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art. Purchased with funds provided by Sue Rose and Alan Segal, 2017. On display, MCA, Sydney, until January 26, 2021.

In 2018, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West commissioned Melbourne-based artist Kathy Temin to make the Christmas decorations for their Los Angeles home.

For the Kardashian-West Christmas party, Temin created a fantasy forest consisting of 64 white treelike forms made of synthetic fur. Kardashian on Instagram described it as “like a winter wonderland Whoville”, referring to the fictional town in the Dr Seuss children’s books.

Temin, who was born in 1968, is known for her use of synthetic fur to create sculptural objects and installations, which are hand sewn and hand stuffed. She has said that although the work is time consuming, the repetitive, craftsperson-like labour is part of the point of the work. She refers to the influence of her father, a tailor, and how she grew up around a factory where people were cutting patterns and sewing; techniques she now uses in her art.

Kathy Temin with another of her works, Orange Cube, 2015, made from synthetic fur, synthetic filling, wood, and steel. Picture: Robin Amadio.

Since the mid-1990s Temin has been making large-scale, indoor monuments that refer to her memories of being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. One of these, titled The Memorial Project: Black Wall (section 2), from 2015, is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and it is currently on display. At the gallery, senior curator Anneke Jaspers shows me the work. It is not what you might expect from a memorial, often a polished black granite wall listing victims’ names. Instead, Temin’s memorial consists of a massive wall of upright columns of black synthetic fur. It is like a big soft toy. Temin has said she originally began working with textiles because of the “heightened, exaggerated, references that soft toys elicit … I use it as a material to generate an emotional response, or as a reference to history”.

Jaspers says that The Memorial Project: Black Wall (section 2) engages with memory informed by Temin’s family history and is sombre yet offers comfort to those who remember. “Kathy often works with these monumental forms that reference the scale of civic sculptures and then she works against those conventions in terms of the materials she uses. I think it prompts us to consider the way we are encouraged to memorialise history and grief in civic spaces. Kathy chooses to work with forms and materials that evoke a sense of play and sensuousness and a desire to touch. It is the magic of the work that you want to touch it.”

Temin aims to establish a sense of intimacy in her work, says Jaspers. “We have come to accept certain tropes or certain approaches to how events are remembered in public spaces, which can be very impersonal. But there are so many other ways that we could remember.

“One of the things I love about Kathy’s work is this compulsion to touch it, to be close to it, to engage in intimate gestures in order to grieve and remember.”