Artist Talk with Sarah Smuts-Kennedy and Jessica Pearless

Sarah Smuts-Kennedy tuned in from Amsterdam for an Instagram Live artist talk with Co-Director, Jessica Pearless. Sarah is currently exhibiting in The ABSTRAXT ABSTRAXT Exhibition at NORTHART, curated by Jessica.

Smuts-Kennedy’s practice is focused on a research based investigation into fields of energy as they engage with conceptual thinking both within an art based language and other intuition driven modes of enquiry.

Her art practice synthesises broad research territories that integrate restorative horticultural and esoteric knowledge. Over the past decade she has been able to test these out at both a social sculptural scale across New Zealand, and her studio based practice. These projects have enabled her to develop embodied knowledge that has culminated in delivering large scale energy installations both within community, landscape and contemporary art contexts. The foundation of her practice centres around performing the possibility of healing with the outcomes of this performance (her life) giving form to artefacts that vibrate the qualities of joy, the vibration when experienced in the bodies of biological life occur as aliveness, balance and peacefulness.

Appearing ethereal and cloud-like, the drawings, with their layered gestural marks, oscillate and swirl. Whilst abstract they suggest space and form. Not landscapes, least not in the traditional sense—there is no horizon and the depth of field is shallow. Yet, with no hard edges or boundaries—other than the paper upon which the marks reside—they do not register as interiors either. The spaces intimated are instead something more akin to a garden, or a bower; an external expanding space, but one that is at the same time cloistered, intimate and in reach.

Sarah is represented by Laree Payne Gallery, Hamilton.