ABOUT

 

Lynne Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Her work involves sustained attention to landscapes to understand systems, entanglement, and sites-within-sites. Both studio and pedagogical practices use materials as conduits for embodiment, connection, and knowledge gathering. Smith leverages a diverse background when teaching and mentoring students in the Sam Fox School at Washington University and in the broader community. Her social practice incorporates art, citizen science, and tactile materials such as fiber to foster curiosity and connection.

Smith is researching a small retention pond in a distant corner of the National Building Arts Center. The post-industrial site is 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. Narratives unfold through intimate interactions with detritus and other forms of matter, and a ubiquitous yet shifty material—sand.

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