About Syd
Artist statment
I began pursuing art fulltime in April 2022, after almost a lifetime of repressing my creative impulses and instincts. Since opening myself to this new reality, the work that has poured out of me has been a joyous rebuttal to decades of artistic repression. My surreal interpretations of cacti are an exploration of my new reality, and the resulting pieces are conspicuous and celebratory.
I delight in collecting material otherwise overlooked and discarded, imagining a new life for each item I find. My collections range from aesthetic to curiosity-inducing to simply useful. It’s in this spirit that my art emerges, inspired by or constructed with my treasures. All my art is built with at least some repurposed/salvaged material, whether hidden within the armature, or incorporated visibly.
My heavy use of non-new material requires my creative process to be flexible and experimental. I often feel a light string of tension that pulls between my vision for a finished piece, and the material options I have to strive for that vision. Each aspect influences the other; the vision influences the materials I choose, and the materials influence the vision, and from the push and pull, what emerges feels intuitive to me.
Artist Bio
Sydney Smith is a full time, Utah-based artist who creates sculptures you might meet in a dream; bold and bright in their movement and color. She is passionate about saving useful material from landfills, and repurposing her finds in the form of biophilic lighting sculptures.
Sydney is a self-taught artist with a degree in engineering, the influence of which can be seen in her project armatures and renderings, and her affinity for large pieces that require structural consideration. Her primary medium is paper mache, which she uses to transform her armatures into unrecognizable pieces.