Serena Smith's
scripto-visual practice explores the perpetual interplay between lived
experience, and reflective observation. Shaped by systematic constraints and
serendipity, written, drawn, and printed outcomes from her work knowingly play
with a lyrical ambiguity that spills out from the structures of communication.
An interest in language, acts of inscription, and technology, is the focus for
ongoing doctoral research that considers the generative intersection between stone
lithography and language. Her recent writings explore an interplay between the embodied practice of lithography and the poetic realms of voice and text.
Attending to the Sound of Sonorous Stones
Whilst she is not depicted in the studio, from the
photograph it is possible to imagine Skiold, immersed in the labour of graining
lithography stone, at home in the gritty sluice, her body tipping and leaning over
the graining sink, hands moving around the stone rhythmically with the ease of
a practised partnership. The abrasive scouring noise, not unlike the spade of gravel
thrown into a tumbling cement mixer at the end of the day, is something she would have easily recognised.
IMPACT 12 Conference Proceedings. link >>
On Stone
Under a clear
blue sky the dragonfly takes its last migration through breezeless air.
Touching down momentarily on still water, too late to know that this salty pool
won’t quench a thirst, its fragile wings are pulled down into the sedimenting
basin of an isolated lagoon. Just out of reach from the coast nothing
leaves the stagnating pool and warmed by the sun the water slowly evaporates.
Under the same
sky 150 million years later, in a territory now under the jurisdiction of a
place called Bavaria, the once calm reef is now land with a settled population.
Business thrives in a town becoming renowned for its rich deposit of finely
sedimented limestone and quarry beds are excavated to feed a growing demand for
this now valuable natural resource being traded in the printing industry. And
once again, by chance, the small creature’s last journey comes to light, each
detail of its flesh depicted in the smooth surface of the soft limestone
matrix.
Inscription: the Journal of Material Text -
Theory, Practice, History. link >>
Ekphrasis:
inscriptions on wood and stone
As the drawing
progresses I wonder if the hands of Celtic scribes also tired, whilst scoring
the lines of Ogham text into fragments of wood. Cutting short repeated grooves
against the grain an effort would have been felt, different to that which
allowed the tool to willingly travel along pathways of growth. Perhaps
they too made use of a device to control the errant gesture, and aid production
of measured lines of written language (...) Traversing the topography of this
substrate, the tracks of these movements cluster and intersect. Lines of
travel collide and converge. And as the tracing and re-tracing repeats and
returns, left within the membrane is a manuscript that documents journeys taken
and territories charted. Laid down in the process is the fragmented text of
notation - a choreographic inscription in which might be glimpsed, an arabesque
performed in the nexus between generative systems, time, and the intentions of
life on the move.
IMPACT Printmaking Journal. link>>
Ecdysis
At first glance,
not to disturb the ground I trod carefully, thinking the creature might still
be there. But on closer inspection the snake had gone, eased itself out, neatly
shed the skin, and moved on; leaving behind this translucent doppelganger, a
ghostlike facsimile of every scale. For millennia,
this elegant undressing must have been repeated. Remembered in the tracery of
this discarded husk; imprinted in the geometric design of interlocking
filigree; duplicated in each cell of the intricate patina; returned to and
replayed, each time the same but different; the force of nature’s habit.
from
the Reside residency. link>>