ABOUT
Lynne Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Her work migrates across mediums, exploring matter, entanglements, landscapes, and sites-within-sites. Smith leverages a diverse background that spans art, architecture, and communication design in her studio practice and when teaching and mentoring students at the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis. She also uses weaving as a tool for social practice to foster grounding and connection within oneself and among communities.
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 will soon unfold by tracing two ubiquitous yet shifty materials: silica and sand.