NEW YORK—Viscera sculptures aside, blood provided the foundation for Kiki Smith’s celebrated work. She grew up the child of well-known artists—namely soprano Jane Smith and architect-sculptor Tony Smith—and since her career began in the early 1980s, she has distinguished herself as one of the most respected artists in the world.

Over the last two and a half decades, Smith has produced sculptures, prints, installations and other works that have been praised as much for their highly developed, if often unsettling, sense of intimacy as for their timely political and social provocations, which brought her critical success back in the 1980s.

A perfect overview, the mid-career retrospective, “Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005,” has been on a tour of the United States for the past year. The show is currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, through Feb. 11, and we chose it as an ArtInfo best exhibition of 2006.

In addition to the exhibition, a new film, “Kiki Smith: Squatting the Palace,” by Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz has just been released in a few select cities.

Smith recently returned to New York after a month-long trip to India. We spoke with her over coffee just around the corner from her East Village home and discussed the retrospective, as well as her work, her career, her life outside of art and reconciling all three.

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Kiki, “A Gathering” has been a huge success. How do you feel looking at your own work?

I wish it was riskier, or more edgy, or more 1970s. More process-oriented and less representational.

I’ve been thinking that a lot lately: I’ve always just been somebody making things. I’m just a thing-maker. I’m the most conservative kind of artist you can be. I make things in a traditional way, taking some lumpen material and turning it into something else.

You’re saying that you’re ashamed that you make objects?

I miss radicality—in my own work and in the art world. The art world seems very product-dominated, and I’m a product maker. But it’s not as interesting an art world now. It’s not as determined by artists themselves. When I first came to New York you really had to work at it. It wasn’t given to you. I miss that a little bit. I would like to be more outside of things, but it’s just not my personality at all.

But your sculptures are more than simple objects because they carry such a multiplicity of meanings.

If you’re playing with images, you’re playing with meanings. So it’s fun to manipulate them, to move them around. Because I am so traditional I like images that already exist. I’m always looking into the past and tweaking what I find there, or reconfiguring it in a way that I find useful to me in my life, but it is playing with a known language.

It was interesting going to India because so many of the artists there make figurative work, and it reminded me how unpopular figuration is in the United States. The figure is a suspect image, and certainly in the last 100 years the figure practically went completely out of art. So I like playing with the figure.

So how do you set about making your work?

Most of the time I just do whatever occurs to me. I don’t think about it too much. I’ll just think, “Oh, I want to make this,” and if it stays in my head for a long enough period of time, it gets done. For me it can take a year between when I think of doing something and when it actually happens.

And is that passage of time important to the character of the work that results?

Sometimes you can think about something, you can start it, and then, six months later, something happens and it informs what you’re working on. The work is given to you in bits, like clues. Often when I’m making something I imagine that all the information comes at the start, but it often happens over time. You can’t get to the end without some weird thing changing in your life or in something that you saw. You’re in a relationship with reality—or some version of reality—and that’s a big part of making things.

You talk about being in a relationship with reality, but sometimes it seems that you allow the work to take the lead.