Olivier Cornet Gallery, Dublin, Ireland.
The Cold Bark Against My Back, a solo show by Vicky Smith
06 Mar 2022 – 03 Apr 2022
The Cold Bark Against My Back
The Olivier Cornet Gallery is delighted to present Vicky Smith's first exhibition with us. Vicky is a member of our AGA group.
Made over two years, these works are informed by the experience of the artist being a mother while trying to make work, the longing to go to new places outside the home, and life events as well as more collective feminist themes. Through the process of painting, making, sketching ideas, and writing her thoughts, Smith reflects on these themes to understand and make sense of the universe, in particular the position of women. She considers how our lives change in motion, leading us to one final destination. She considers Greek philosopher Marcus Aurelius’s question in Meditations: “What does nature hold dearer or more proper to herself than the invisible existence of change?”
The starting point for this new body of work is Smith’s fascination with stories of women in the news media concerning attacks, catastrophe, conflict, depression, desperation, domestic acts, loss, love, moving on, murder, resilience, survival and willpower. She is intrigued by how certain mass media stories about women resonate for women as echoes of their own lives. Women’s stories interconnect like the branches of a tree or a woven tapestry or the thread count in a blanket. Smith is drawn to the crisis in each story by how it is unpacked, as if each woman is unfolding clothes from a suitcase after a journey from girlhood to womanhood and beyond. Smith appropriates news photographs depicting these women, meshing them into paint, photo collages, readymade sculptures, annotated sketchbook drawings, and collages.
Smith paints female portraits and female figures in an imagined landscape which revisits her grandfather’s archive of photographs and slides depicting notable places in Ireland: Maam Valley, Lake Inagh, Galway Cathedral, Inish Turk, Lakes of Killarney, Lough Corrib, Leenane, Adare, Doolin, the road to Clifden, Kylemore Abbey, and Maam Bridge. These repurposed landscapes delineate a new kingdom, inspired by Sylvia Plath’s short story “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom”, written not long after she had left home, which Plath described as “the story of a teen-age girl who passes through the temptation of the material world, grows aware of her own idealism and power to help others, and discovers the City of God”. This symbolic tale, a learning story, grapples with our recurring change in motion. Some artists write, paint or make work to figure out this change and what kind of artist or being they want to be. Two paintings based on the artist's mother and grandmother represent powerful matriarchal leaders of this female utopia, symbolising perseverance in the face of adversity.
Among the experimental surrealist sculptures are appropriated domestic objects, a fabric figure made from a found green air couch, an electric blanket with a portrait stitched on the front, a medical magnifying light, an hourglass figure cutout and foam-filled nylons that represent knobbly knees, a milk bottle plaster cast with a whisk that no longer whisks and metal wires, a plaster cast tower of collaged news photographs, bedside table lights and an iron that has become stuck in a bucket of cement. The news photograph of a young woman with brown hair collaged onto the front of the iron is a survivor of a catastrophic event, whose neck and face bear physical scars from this attack. The hourglass cutout represents the artist's legs cut from the waist down, symbolising a recurring nightmare the artist had in which she could not raise her head in a crowded room and only saw people's legs and feet. Her dream resonates with Plath’s story “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom”: acknowledging that conventional gender norms constrain and repress women, Smith suggests that women, like Mary Ventura, should opt out and imagine an alternative, even utopian society.
Vicky Smith is a multidisciplinary process-based artist & educator from Galway City. Her practice experiments with painting, printmaking, film, photography, assemblage sculptures and installation. Her work is centred around the feelings conjured by a year in which she existed as a body predominantly in a domestic space. Smith researches body awareness in domestic spaces, feelings of interiority and how these reflect a visceral understanding of the human body, the female psyche, and her relationship to domestic space and nature as a means of understanding the figure as a subject matter. The work inspires a phenomenological inquiry into how as women we see each other and ourselves. The viewer is invited to see, feel, and empathise with the experience of the interior struggle that a sentient body undergoes in a domestic space and how this conflict affects the human body on physical, conscious, and subconscious levels.
She is a recent recipient of the Visual Arts Agility Award, Round 1 from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2021. In 2017, 2014 & 2011 she was awarded an Individual Artist Award from Galway City Council & Artist in School Award from Galway County Council (2017 & 2016). She has worked as an artist-in-residence with various schools in the West of Ireland as part of the Creative Schools Arts Council initiative. She was an invited artist on the Making Space process-led collaborative project coordinated by Croi na Gaillimhe, Our Lady’s College, and the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her work is in private collections in Ireland, UK, United Arab Emirates, and Canada. In 2013 she had an artist residency at Galway Arts centre which culminated in a solo exhibition Mega Bubble Space Burbs. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art & H.Dip for Art and Design Teachers from Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork in 1999, an MA from Goldsmiths College (Arts Administration & Cultural Policy), University of London (2007), & an MA (Art in Contemporary World) from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin (2011). She worked with the British Council as a teacher of art, craft, and design on the Teachers of Botswana Recruitment Scheme for two years.
Recent exhibitions and collaborations include a text & audio recording in response to the ‘Pandora Myth’, Winter Papers Vol.6 2020 & Solus Nua audio-visual work with Claire-Louise Bennet & Ruby Wallis. Recent exhibitions include; ‘Memento’, Olivier Cornet Gallery; ‘Pluid Project’, The Cowshed Gallery, Farmleigh Estate; ‘The Morphing Feminine,’ a Bloomsday, group exhibition with the Olivier Cornet Gallery; ‘Drawing on Don Quixote’ Wexford National Opera House, VUE Art Fair at the RHA, Dublin (with the Olivier Cornet Gallery); ‘Benchmark’, Linenhall Arts Centre, Mayo; ‘Hiatus’,126 Artist-Run Gallery, Galway; ‘Material Conditions’, Platform Arts, Belfast; ‘Nasty Women’, Pallas/Project studios, Dublin; Narrating Self, Translating the Other, Galway Arts Centre;‘House of Blindness’(solo) PS2 & Paragon Studios Belfast; ‘Little Kingdoms’, Catalyst Arts, Belfast; ‘Spectrum of Activity’, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork; ‘Discerning Eye’, Pall Mall Galleries, London; Fresh Art Fair, Design Centre, Islington, London; Affordable Art Fair, Twickenham Art Gallery, London.
With special thanks to Phillina Sun for exhibition text editorial input and comments.
Please note that the exhibition at the gallery also includes experimental sculptures.
