Yasmin Smith
APT10
Born 1984, Sydney, Australia
Lives and works in Sydney
Yasmin Smith is known for her research-based ceramic installations that formally and chromatically reflect the natural landscape. Key to the artist’s process is burning plant material as a basis for glazes. The minerals, nutrients and toxins — absorbed by the plants through soil and water — that remain in their ashes result in the fascinating textural and colour variations in the finishes of Smith’s ceramic casts of the original plants.
Yasmin Smith / Australia b.1984 / Flooded Rose Red Basin 2018, installed at GOMA for APT10, March 2023 / Purchased 2021 with funds from the Future Collective through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / © Yasmin Smith / Photograph: N Harth, QAGOMA
While Smith was in residence at the Jinhui Ceramic Sanitary Ware Factory, Sichuan province, China, she made Flooded Rose Red Basin. The casts of bamboo and gum highlight tensions between local and introduced species, and the ecological challenges that both China and Australia face with the intensive industrialisation of the countryside and the current climate emergency. Creating subtly textured sculptural forms, Smith asks the viewer to look past the cliched imagery associated with these iconic national symbols to the plants’ physical, material and chemical properties.
Yasmin Smith / Australia b.1984 / Flooded Rose Red Basin (detail) 2018, installed at GOMA for APT10, March 2023 / Purchased 2021 with funds from the Future Collective through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / © Yasmin Smith / Photograph: N Harth, QAGOMA
Flooded Rose Red Basin 2018
- SMITH, Yasmin - Creator