Mandy Smith - BA (Hons) Fine Art 2018 Graduate from Solent University, Southampton

Mandy Smith is a Southampton based artist, her work focusing largely on familial interactions, from the small every day, seemingly insignificant events that happen whilst bringing up children to the sometimes overwhelming feelings of loss – covering birth, illness and death.

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After being given the all clear from a rare form of cancer - Synovial Sarcoma, followed a few years later by the death of her mother from breast cancer, prompted Mandy Smith to embark on a lifelong ambition to change her career from I.T. to contemporary art. 

 

Her work emerges from moments and feelings of experiences with the maternal: examining details of the past between herself and her children and also the relationship with her mother. Combining elements of different memories, Smith distorts her past, making a patchwork to convey a feeling.

 

Mixing a desire to learn new processes, Smith mirrors the content of her work, repeating known processes whilst simultaneously introducing novel new approaches in order to enrich her practice. Materials and technical aspects of work by woman artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager and Sarah Lucas have been an inspiration.

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Smith’s choice of materials is modest, often using clothing and stuffed toys, sourced from the domestic setting, reworked by the artist to unsettling effect. Through intervention in scale or material quality, Smith navigates a space between bodily and monstrosity.