Lydia Smith

Artist Statement

I am an interdisciplinary research-based artist invested in witnessing what is marked, lost, and lingers in the aftermath of death. My work is informed by my own experiences of grief following a period of family loss. In turn, I am interested in how inheritance from the past shapes our futures. My work engages expanded forms of photography and drawing to respond to sites with histories of decay or haunting: cemeteries, archives of family images, locked briefcases, and remnants of ancient landscapes. I imagine these subjects as ghostly bodies and seek their hidden narratives.

My practice begins in the field, where I borrow ethnographic strategies from anthropology and folklore to collaborate with places through walking audits, interviews, photo documentation, and field recordings. Returning to the studio, I apply organizational processes of assemblage and editing to my collected materials to develop methods of translation. Utilizing the structural apparatus of the map, archive, and document, I explore the margins of memory, knowledge, and felt experience.