Emma Smith

“Broadly speaking my work negotiates notions of displacement, reparation and debt, climatic uncertainty and societal precariousness, institutional restructures and the militarisation of culture, in the (predominantly) painted form. More recently I have come to understand this as a fascination with art and emergency. The paintings spring out of this enquiry into volatility, and lately we are no strangers to it.

I was invited into the mothermother project by my long term friend, painter, stitcher, maker Kelly Pretty. It was a pleasure to show alongside her reedy, unsteady, hopeful stitched worlds, Natalie Tozer’s performative sculptural practice in the primordial weight of ruin, Teresa Peter’s sensory ceramic seances, Cheyenne Rose’s glitch and serve large format collages and Judy Darragh’s wall works that spike and hiss, awry and spry like electrocuted wayfinding. These works chart the hubris of the monumental, the fragility of this or that moment, a precarious constellation.”

Emma Smith x mothermother 2020