Natalie Smith

Natalie_Smith1   Natalie_Smith2

Contact: natalie-ann-smith@hotmail.co.uk

The work of Natalie Smith is centred on her motivation to create what she titles ‘Anonymous Space’. Her sculptural works exist as a product of their environments, delivering not only a visual description of their location, but also function as a tangible artefact of time, space and experience. They possess the ability to introduce the viewer to a place they may have never experienced, evoke nostalgia by utilising ‘the familiar’ and command an application of the viewer’s personal memories in order to re-imagine the environment inside the exhibition space. What stands before the audience is therefore an extract of a wider environment, an incomplete yet condensed insight into an unfamiliar space that has been constructed by the artist, yet to be understood as a whole must be supplemented by the viewer’s imagination. Her artwork consequently becomes an interesting collaboration between artist and audience, joining together the intent of the maker and the recollection of the viewer to successfully reconstruct the original location. ‘Anonymous Space’ is what she sees to be the final product of the viewer’s observations, a combination of their culturally taught association and personal imagination, which will result in a psychological conclusion unique to each viewer.

This hypothesised space is a fictional environment deduced from the artwork through an attempt to visualise the origin of the material she presents. It is individually shaped through the viewers own memory and experience of similar encounters and ‘anonymous’ due to its physical inexistence and inability to be identified or traced. ‘Anonymous Space’ is encouraged by visual prompts within her artwork, inspiring the viewer to create subconscious conclusions regarding the derivations and biographies of the given objects.