Emily Smith is an award winning artist based in Gloucestershire who creates paintings, sculpture and installation pieces. These pieces are concerned with ritual and symbolic objects and are an exploration of inner spaces both physical and psychological. Primarily using plaster casts, her work reveals a constant re-appropriation of methods as diverse as carpentry, ceramics and needlework. Influenced by childhood memories, nostalgic spaces are suggested through symbolic objects which represent a particularly subjective interaction with the memory of a significant person or place. Subtle overlaying of projections onto sculpture builds up a visual palimpsest and restructures the narrative of each object. The artist's work is concerned with loss, memory and trace of an absence. Her current body of work stands as an investigation into Derrida’s theory of trace, erasure and the instability of visual signifiers as symbols of memory.
The artist's early work reveals her grounding in ceramics and painting, aspects of which are revealed in the current body of work, especially through the exploration of mouldmaking and casting techniques. The artist's early pieces explore a world of death/loss and replacement/reproduction, which encompasses the passing of innocence and the arrival of sexuality. Her Work dwells in the realm of Louise Bourgeois' changeling adolescent, of Hans Bellmer's enchanted garden of childhood.

Read Darbyshire Award Exhibition 'Retrace: Scripting Memory' exhibition Press Release.

Artists website

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