Episode 23 - Louise Frances Smith

Liminal Gallery Podcast host, Louise Fitzjohn, speaks with contemporary artist Louise Frances Smith, to coincide with her solo exhibition ' ‘It gathered here’ in The Cupboard at Liminal Gallery in Margate. The exhibition presents a series of site specific sculptures, playing with scale, the organic, body-like forms appear to be engulfing the small space, growing, crawling and spreading around the walls - posing the question of what the repercussions of human intervention is on our fragile coastal ecosystems, hiding behind the door of The Cupboard.

The sculptures in ‘It gathered here’ are created from seaweed collected by the artist from Margate beaches - specifically wireweed seaweed (Sargassum Muticum) which was thought to have been introduced to the coastline in the 1970s to bolster the failing ‘native’ oyster industry. The ‘invasive’ and ‘non-native’ species is now thriving due to climate change and can smother light and oxygen from species that live beneath the surface of the water. Smith has used this abundant wireweed seaweed to create a bioplastic, mixed with fabric and found plastic for an experimental material to create the works. The inspiration for the sculptural forms comes from epibiosis, which is the close interaction between two different organisms, the host organism providing an environment for the other which is attached to its living surface.

The Cupboard is Liminal Gallery’s second exhibition space, tiny but sleek it is exclusively available to artists living and working in Thanet. Smith will use this space to showcase a new body of work, employing natural local resources to comment on the fragility of Kent’s coastlines and the anthropogenic impact it is enduring.

Louise Frances Smith lives and works in Ramsgate, Kent. Her practice spans sculpture, installation and works on paper. Working with an array of materials including clay, seaweed and bioplastic, Smith creates highly textured surfaces to bring attention to the patterns and textures created by nature, magnifying micro details alongside man-made interventions. By collecting materials from her local coastline to use as materials in her work, Smith’s works are conceptually and physically linked to her local landscape where she takes her inspiration.

Last year Smith was selected as a finalist for The Ingram Prize 2023, exhibiting at Pavilion Gallery, Cromwell Place. Early in 2023 she received an Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant to create a new body of work which was exhibited at Collect Open 2023, Somerset House. Smith later exhibited this work at The Margate School.

In 2022 Smith received DYCP Arts Council England funding which led to her first solo show at Joseph Wales Gallery ‘HOLDFAST, experiments in seaweed, chalk & clay’. Other recent group exhibitions include - ‘The Wild Collective’, collaborative exhibition between Thrown Contemporary & Metafleur at Omved Gardens, London; ‘Despatch’, Work Show Grow Mail Art Collaboration, New Forest Heritage Centre, and ‘ING Discerning Eye 2021’, Mall Galleries, London. Louise Frances Smith graduated from CityLit with a Ceramics Diploma in 2019 and from Kingston University with a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree in 2009.

Visit the Online Viewing Room here:

https://www.liminal-gallery.com/louise-frances-smith-it-gathered-here

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With original music by Lorenzo Bonari.

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