STATEMENT

 

I use interdisciplinary research and contemporary and craft-based practices to explore material politics and poetics and themes of fragility and resilience. My current work responds to a retention pond at the National Building Arts Center (NBAC), a site formerly occupied by the Sterling Steel Company. Detritus, discards, and ‘invasive’ species are reimagined and recontextualized in sculptures, weavings, and installations. Through a process of "reverse extraction," I remove foundry detritus from the ‘deep pit’ (now pond) as a healing gesture toward the local landscape. Rusty fragments, ceramic tubes, and slag are elevated and ordered adjacent to steel trusses and cast-iron architectural columns. A spherical seed head dangles on a copper wire that drifts above an ‘as-is’ Ikea mirror and three tons of sand. I thread and weave the found, foraged, and overlooked through their sites of origin as material echoes and alternative narratives of place.


BIO

Lynne Smith is an artist, designer, and educator whose work explores material politics and poetics and uses a sustained attention to landscape to understand the systems entangled in sites. Her current work focuses on a small retention pond at the National Building Arts Center in Sauget, Illinois, a small village in the heart of the American Bottom, which is occupied by heavy industry. Her project, “What’s at the Bottom of the Pond,” received grants from the IMSE Lab at Washington University in St. Louis and the Luminary Futures Fund, a regranting initiative of the Andy Warhol Foundation. Interdisciplinary research and relational activities are foundational to her studio and pedagogical practices, and materials are conduits for empowerment, embodiment, connection, and knowledge. Smith teaches in the foundations program at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University. She facilitates workshops for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and other community-based organizations and non-profits, including Building Futures, the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center, and previously for North Pole Studios and Portland Public Schools in Portland, Oregon.