ABOUT

 

Lynne Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Her work migrates across material and medium, exploring entanglements, landscapes, and sites-within-sites. Both studio and pedagogical practices use materials as conduits for embodiment, connection, and knowledge. Smith leverages a diverse background when teaching and mentoring students at the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis. She also uses weaving and other mediums in social practice to foster grounding and build community.

 

Smith is researching a small retention pond in a far corner of a post-industrial site in Sauget, IL, a small village known for heavy industrial occupation and contamination. Through an artistic and archaeological process of "Reverse Extraction," Smith removes foundry detritus from the pond: ceramic tubes for molten metal, rusty steel, slag, and glass are inventoried alongside plants, crayfish, insect songs, and frogs. Material and poetic narratives unfold by tracing a ubiquitous yet shifty material: silica/sand.