Serena Smith works with drawing, writing, and stone lithography to create objects and texts that explore the material poetics of language. By way of these practices of inscription and the lyrical registers of image and text, she dwells on the paradoxes of lived experience. A highly skilled lithographer, Smith’s works are often conceptually underwritten by this nineteenth century technology as a medium that gives rise to language created by an engendering touch, between human hands and the sedimented dust of evolution. Embedded in the printed outcomes of this practice is the weight of the limestone matrix, the labour of sentient bodies and traces of the visceral contact of skin and stone. It is as such that her lithographs and bookworks bear witness to both the gravitational forces of mortality and the labours of a poet.

Invented in the 19th century, lithography enabled image, word, notation and sign to be printed from a single matrix. Smith's work reflects this capacity of the medium to bring diverse visual worlds together through methods that schematically combine improvisatory marks from the autographic trace, iconographic forms from the symbolic languages of religious art, photographic imagery and written text. Through the elegiac interplay of these elements, her images obliquely reference the mystical landscapes of English pastoralism, scripto-visual pages of illuminated manuscripts, and invented cosmologies of visionary abstraction.

 

Born in London in 1960, her practice as artist and educator, followed on from undergraduate study in Art and Drama and twelve years as a professional fine art lithographer at the Curwen Studio. At postgraduate level she studied at Central Saint Martins’ School of Art and the Institute of Education, UCL. Subsequently, informed by her work as an artisan printer, Smith’s doctoral research at Loughborough University explored the genealogies and material worlds of stone lithography and heterogeneous nature of lithographic language. Within the academic field of fine art research, her activities include exhibited works, conference papers, and published texts. Drawing on a transdisciplinary field, her written publications span the domains of printmaking discourse, the social sciences and humanities, and creative writing in the visual arts. 

 

Coupled to these expanded research interests she continues to develop her specialisation as a lithographer and this has led to global recognition for her expertise. Smith is an elected associate of the Royal-Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE) and her works are held in several private and public collections, including the British Museum, London, the University of California, Berkley, USA, and Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Germany.