Recall: Sculptural Myth and Memory by Lauren Dana Smith

Reception & Artist Talk: Saturday, August 24, 4:30p – 6:30p

We invite you to join us for an exhibition reception, awards reception and artist talks at Harwood Art Center on Saturday, August 24, 2024 with artist talks starting at 5:00pm. This event is free and open to all ages.

Recall: Sculptural Myth and Memory

The sculptural relief paintings in the Recall series leverage intuition and memory, spatial relationship, physical tension and aesthetic awareness. Some viewers interpret the works as sinew, muscle, bone and respond to the surface tension created in the space. Others have felt haunted as if they were visiting another time in history. Both experiences hold truth. Created between 2021 and 2024 and utilizing tactile and textural media (plaster, gauze, upcycled materials such as paper, shipping/packing materials, plastics, cardboard, charcoal, oil stick, acrylic paint) on a relational scale, every piece in the series references both body and earth. Emotional tension and narrative is driven through the manipulation of structure, form and contrast.

My relationship with plaster as a medium began more than a decade ago as an art psychotherapist in New York City, working in medical/surgical hospital settings. In my therapeutic training and work, I was drawn to plaster as a symbolic modality for the support and transformation of both physical and psychological states. I learned how plaster is thermally responsive and warms up while you’re working with it and then cools before hardening completely. It is almost a mirror of one’s own experience in a body. I explored the material in my studio and also with my patients in the hospital. When engaging a patient with plaster, I introduced an organic process into an otherwise sterile hospital environment and connected them with an awareness of their own body contour and temperature. This was particularly relevant in the context of medical illness or surgical experiences where people frequently felt detached from their bodies or due to invasive procedures, felt an actual or perceived sense of loss of bodily autonomy or physical agency. There is a subversive quality in the material that I am drawn to: in repurposing the same plaster gauze used for mending broken bones in the emergency department I attempt to mend emotional wounds, traumas and psychological conflict through an arts-based, therapeutic relationship.
During my experience working as a palliative care psychotherapist, I used plaster to support people transitioning from this life to the next. Plaster helped me to cast the clasped hands of loved ones as they approached end-of-life. I worked with thousands of families over those many years. Those cast sculptures were meant to be transitional objects, again to bridge a liminal divide, and to provide comfort and closeness against the backdrop of psychological disorganization, that for some people, proximity to death inspires.

Later in my practice now, I no longer work in medical settings. I find respite in the mountains of Taos and I revisit plaster in my practice with an aesthetic awareness. I am still drawn to the flexibility, durability and process of becoming – moving from warm and fluid — to cool and cold — to hard and matte dry. My earlier flat paintings have transformed into sculptural entities. I accentuate physical and emotional contour. I forge deep crevasses, fractures, joints, fault lines, masses, plateaus, gorges, new formations – neither explicitly anatomical nor geographical – and yet somehow both. I experiment with physical tension over pigmentation. I introduce other materials – pumice, aluminum, charcoal. I build physical armatures out of soft sculptural materials. I repurpose found materials in my home and make them foundational. As I continue in the series, the pieces form their own narrative. They somehow locate themselves in myth and memory as well as the present. The memory of human experience, of mending the body and the mind, and the myth that we are broken and cannot be repaired. Through this experiential sculptural series I think often about parallels between body and land. How we may become psychologically eroded over time and yet through these experiences, new formations of self may emerge – possibly more durable than before. I ask, “where does the earth end and my body begin? Where does your body begin and where does it end? How can we be both?”

The sculptural relief paintings in the Recall series leverage intuition and memory, spatial relationship, physical tension and aesthetic awareness. Some viewers interpret the works as sinew, muscle, bone and respond to the surface tension created in the space. Others have felt haunted as if they were visiting another time in history. Both experiences hold truth. Created between 2021 and 2024 and utilizing tactile and textural media (plaster, gauze, upcycled materials such as paper, shipping/packing materials, plastics, cardboard, charcoal, oil stick, acrylic paint) on a relational scale, every piece in the series references both body and earth. Emotional tension and narrative is driven through the manipulation of structure, form and contrast. In this series, Smith asks, “where does the earth end and my body begin? Where does your body begin and where does it end? How can we be both?”

Exhibition Catalog