Sally Smart: In The Cut
The collages, assemblages, performances and installations of Sally Smart centre a legacy of feminist art-making, giving forgotten histories material form.
Image credit: Sally Smart, The Artist’s Ballet, 2020, work in progress, digital and screen printing on various textiles with multiple collage elements, size variable. Photo: A. Murphy. Courtesy the artist
Sally Smart’s earliest memories involve a sense of her body in space. The renowned contemporary artist grew up near the Heysen Trail, the legendary walking track that snakes over some of the most remote terrain in South Australia, from the Fleurieu Peninsula to the Flinders Ranges. There, she roamed with her sisters over the vast, semi-arid landscape. She made things from rocks and built houses out of pine needles. The sky was so wide and clear it felt like she could touch it. This spirit of freedom stayed with her.
“[There] was this capacity to go from a very big, spatial experience to a very minute experience and at night there were animals, there were birds – the trees were also very powerful,” Smart says. “From early on, we came into contact with professors from universities, medical people, people from all over would come and stay and that opened up the world.” She gives a wistful smile. “My mother would always say that when she would point something out, everyone would look one way and I would look the other. Straight away, I wanted to be an artist. It was clear from a very young age.”
Landscapes, of course, aren’t limited to geography. Our bodies are bound by psychological landscapes, historical landscapes. Our lives are splintered by cracks in the cultural psyche or circumscribed by those that have gone before us. Smart, from the very beginning, has deconstructed and reconstructed the world around her. In her hands, the scissors, the sewing pin – tools associated with the feminine and the domestic – accrue a subversive power ...Subscribe to read this article in full
