Shannon Smith
Shannon Smith
Birth place
10×48×28cm soapstone
$4,100
Shanonn Smith
Coy
26×26×16cm soapstone
$3,900
Shannon Smith
Backchat
36×25.5×15cm soapstone, marble base
$4,900
Shannon Smith
Edge
12.5×26.5×12.5cm soapstone
$3,500
Shannon Smith
Spill
14.5×19×20cm limestone
$2,000
Shannon Smith
Torso II
17.5×12×19cm limestone
$1,500
Shannon Smith is an Australian born artist of Peruvian descent, working in the field of sculpture. Smith graduated in 2016 from the National Art School, Sydney, with a Master of Fine Art, where she completed a BFA and a BFA (Hons). At the completion of her studies Smith was engaged by the NAS as a Sessional Lecturer in the Sculpture department. Smith has since undertaken several international artist residencies, was granted a Parker’s Fine Art Award, and was exhibited as a finalist in the Tom Bass Prize for Figurative Sculpture (2018). Her work has been acquired by QANTAS, the M G Dingle & G B Hughes Collection, the National Art School Archive: Student Collection, and other private collections through purchased and commissioned works.
My current practice as a contemporary artist is driven by my interest in translating physical experience into static material. Propelled by the question of how to express sensation through sculptural form, my stone carvings grapple with the desire to allude to the body without representing it; at once pursuing abstraction and referential meaning.
Working in the tradition of direct carving, my sculptures are a result of a continual response to light over form, through which the nuance of shadow cast by the object’s changing silhouette informs my successive aesthetic decisions.
My practice is driven by the possibilities of stone. Intrigued by materiality, I reflect on the trace of touch as a signifier of time and presence. I am interested in the conflation of construction with carving and in exploring the natural joinery of the body.
Reflecting on the figure as my subject has led me to consider my role as a female artist in the presentation of the body. Instead of creating work from bodies I have seen, my works are thoughts about the body that I inhabit. My work, as a result, inverts the typical gaze from outward, in.
