Maker's statement
(in reference to 2020.5 - 2020.11, parianware pieces and textiles, which all appeared in Matt Smith:2020 at Brookfields Properties)
The parian pieces reflect an ongoing Investigation Into portraiture and the memorialisation of selected people In history. This work links Intervenion projects In museums which explore queerness, colonisation and homophobia and how edited histories have erased certain ways of being from the record.
By combining high and low value objects, Industrial production with the handmade, hierarchies are questioned and binaries disrupted.
The textiles also play with this erasure. In additional to removing the central figures In the works, the pieces play with the movement from fine art to craft and back to fine art and the movement between genders.