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 ideas 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 her practice, in the form of hand-coloured lithographs and bookworks, 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 these ephemeral works bear witness to both the gravitational forces of mortality, and the labours of a poet.

Technically and visually complex, her works schematically bring together improvisatory marks from the drawn trace, iconographic forms from the symbolic languages of religious art, photographic imagery from her local environment and written language. Through the elegiac interplay of these elements, she obliquely references the mystical landscapes of English pastoralism, scripto-visual pages of illuminated manuscripts, and invented cosmologies of visionary abstraction. 

Born in London in 1960, Smith’s 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, London and Cambridge (1985-97). 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 doctorate research at Loughborough University (2018-24) explored the genealogies and material worlds of stone lithography and heterogeneous nature of lithographic language. 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. Her activities within the academic context of fine art research include exhibited works (Drawing Articulations: a radical drawing symposium, Leeds Beckett University, 2024; Ecologies of Drawing: in Situ, Loughborough University, 2022), conference papers (Festival of Ideas: Transitions, Loughborough University, 2022; IMPACT 12 International Printmaking Conference, UWE, 2022; Material Encounters Summer Colloquium: Uncertain Knowledges, Birmingham University, 2020), and published texts.