Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? They say how a person does one thing is how they do everything. For interdisciplinary artist Kerrie Smith, the way she walks in nature and how she creates in the studio are fundamentally one and the same. She maintains attention to detail but dissolves into the flow, awed by the infinite sweep and scale but enchanted by the smallest glimmering facet, informed by a lifetime of experience and study but ultimately guided by intuition and a taste for the fantastical. When it’s time to create, her abstract narratives maintain a lively balance between showing and telling, with the ultimate aim of bringing her audiences along on her journey—or really, on their own journeys, but why not set out together.
Smith is a dedicated daily walker whose studio and home is nestled against a verdant nature preserve which she explores daily, rain or shine, and from whose botanical and mineral bounty she lovingly gathers not only inspiration, but materials—along with inner peace and expanded perspectives, she returns home with stones, sticks and shells, leaves and petals, sand and seeds, berries perhaps, pinecones and feathers. In this way, her eventual paintings and mixed media compositions and installations both are and are not landscapes. Visible in glimpses, and physically present as material, the natural world is indelibly active; but her works play with scale, detail, color, and line in a way that reaches into abstraction, pattern, and pure feeling.
Smith’s palette amplifies the most affecting impressions of nature, by turns gestural and supercharged or ethereal and nuanced, reflecting as much the kaleidoscope of the living planet as the abundant spectrum of spirit and psyche that being in tune with it offers. Across works for wall, floor, and architectural suspension, her unfurling, mandalic energy hotspots are prismatic like church windows and in a way there is scripture—in the form of calligraphic poetry. Her layering of pattern, image, and pure medium create tapestry-like works with texture and movement, interlacing fractal forms in a way that organizes dimensional space as well as pictorial. Her background in theatrical design makes itself felt here, giving direction to her desire to create experience beyond imagery.
Smith works at the intersection of ecological and feminist perspectives, feeling in herself the legacy of generations of matriarchal happy warriors, and in this way her work offers a counterpoint to disaster. She grew up around the ley lines of Glastonbury, Somerset—the same esoteric network of powerful currents in the earth that has attracted communities from Druids to alternative energy companies, to people who dropped out of society to live in teepees. “We walked the moors,” she says, remembering the light, the inlets, the willow trees, the smell of rain, and the feeling of freedom. Where she lives now was a Chumash hunting ground at least 11,000 years ago, considered sacred as well. A lot of history has happened since then, but the land is protected now, and Smith can walk there today, feeling connected to both the distant past and the people who will walk here in the future. And she can hold all that in the present—for that is indeed art’s superpower—to bring back to the studio and let it play out on the canvas.
Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles, 2024