KIKI SMITH, you could say, is the Stevie Nicks of the contemporary art world – and I mean that as high praise. Both artists have endearingly an eccentric public persona and a highly identifiable aesthetic that leans toward the Gothic and mythological. The combination of attributes has developed ardent admirers for them both.

Smith's universe, abundantly visible in "Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005," a major exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center, is featured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her sculptures, drawings, and prints are equally informed by Charles Addams, Grimm fairy tales, classic American decorative arts, and the human body in all its abject glory. The exhibition includes powerful works, such as 1992's Tale (a life-size papier-mâché and beeswax sculpture of a naked woman on all fours with a long tail of excrement trailing from her behind), blown glass teardrops, and creepy cast bronze hybrids of humans and animals.

In person Smith is warm, honest, self-effacing, and deceptively goofy. In the midst of installing her 25-year survey exhibition at the SFMOMA (and a show at John Berggruen Gallery), Smith wears a Manhattan color scheme of basic black, but it's a flowing, natural-fiber kind of ensemble that sets off her luxuriantly graying hair.

After she pulls off a pair of black rubber gloves – offered by the installation crew after the standard bright blue ones didn't quite fit the artist's sensibility – I can see her hands and wrists are dotted with seemingly self-made tattoos. During our conversation, hearty laughter punctuates incisive comments about her practice and her place in contemporary art. She makes a number of unselfconscious references to the fact that her 50th birthday has passed and she is consciously marking a distinct chapter of life with this exhibition.

"When they asked me to do the show, I said yes without reservation. It was an appropriate time," she tells me. "I decided this was the right moment for me as a woman artist. In a certain way it was my obligation to have some kind of show that's marking my turf. It's good to mark 20 years of space and cut the cord and go float out into the universe."

"But I probably won't float too far," she says, laughing. She had earlier admitted she is a major homebody.

Smith is firmly rooted in the handmade, her practice seems like something of a cottage industry. "I work at home, in my living room. I work on my kitchen table or on the floor," she reveals. "My house is in a constant battle between being a living room and a studio. Every day things get hidden under the chairs."

The real dirty work – the making of bronze casts and fine art prints – takes place outside her home at foundries and presses. She views her work in those mediums as collaborative, invoking a contemporary dialogue about craft, something that, at the start of Smith's career in the 1980s, didn't quite jibe with postmodern hegemony.

"Back then, I was marginalized for making craft and, for me, it was important to do it because you want art [to exist in] all spaces," she explains. "Craft was something I always had a strong affinity to, that I appreciated, and have a pleasurable relationship to. I'm using those techniques and slipping them into an art envelope."

Of course, craft practices in recent art have often invoked feminism, and that's something Smith fervently, albeit unconventionally, embraces.

"Once someone said that nobody would take my work seriously because it was made out of papier-mâché and cardboard and it was just going to fall apart. And I got really angry," Smith says. "I made a piece and it broke. I glued it back together, and I decided to make everything as shitty as possible – I would use all my bad craftsmanship and girl carpentry in an aggressively homemade manner. I'd use all the craft and the things that I love as a kind of aggression. And it worked."

That said, she does not view her work as having an intended message. "As a woman, I'd like to be an artist, to have cultural appreciation of all people's creativity," she offers. "It's not like I want my work to be about something in a confined way – I just want it to be like the wind. I want it to be that it can be as conflicted as I am. The rest of it you want it to blow all around and to have a faith that that will tell you what to do."

The impressive number of objects in the SFMOMA show – along with new sculpture and drawing on display at John Berggruen Gallery – attests to Smith's seemingly boundless imagination and countless hours at that kitchen table.

"I make a lot of stuff, and I always say it's because I don't have any idea of what else to do," Smith says. "I always think that maybe I have an underdeveloped personality. I'm a fidgety person, so it's very meditative, working. It's exciting to do something where you can affect change. There's a lot of life when you feel like there's not much possibility to impact your environment, whereas making art you can impact your environment in a really big way. You can make something out of nothing and see if it resonates.

"It's a really good lifestyle. I highly recommend it."

'Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005' runs Sat/19 through Jan. 29, 2006, Fri.-Tues., 11 a.m.-5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.-8:45 p.m., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. Smith and Chuck Close appear at a book signing at the SFMOMA, Sat/19, 4 p.m. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for 12 and under and members (free first Tues.; half price Thurs, 6-8:45pm). (415) 357-4000. 'Kiki Smith: A Cautionary Tale' runs through Dec. 22, John Berggruen Gallery, 228 Grant, SF. Mon.-Fri., 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sat., 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. (415) 781-4629.