A Ribbon Unfurling encompasses a collection of drawings, costumes and video made during Lara’s residencies at The British School at Rome, St John’s College, Oxford and currently ACME’s Firestation, London.
The installed drawings resemble ‘unswept’ floors, animal skins, pattern pieces and shrouds often acting as anatomical or neurological maps. They relate to her research and interest in historical and contemporary medicine, disease and ‘holy contagion’. Works include the film Unnamed Saint (2022), which comprises a reworking of her mixed-media installation Relics (also on show), and her project As Sewn to the Earth (2022), a series of textiles inspired by Herjolfsnæs, a Norse settlement on Kalaallit Nunaat in Greenland. The items are made from pattern pieces adapted from clothing found at the settlement during an archaeological dig in 1921.
Ribbons appear throughout the pieces on display in the gallery, and run around the space as embroidered reels of text, hinting at the voices that exist between mind and body, produced and stored by both.
This exhibition coincides with a Symposium in the gallery on 11 February entitled Reaching Out: Gesture – Texture – Text, which will explore the interrelations between the idea of the gestural and the textural, with a particular focus on the written word.
Biography:
Currently a live/work resident at ACME Fire Station, Lara Smithson was the Bridget Riley Fellow 2021/22 at The British School at Rome and St John’s College, Oxford’s Artist in Residence, 2023. Smithson’s work has been shown internationally, including solo presentations at Coleman Projects, London 2023; Una Vetrina, Rome 2022 and The Why Not Gallery, Tblisi 2018. She was awarded the Benoît Doche de Laquintane Collection Prize 2024 at Art O Rama, Marseille presented by Des Bains, London and will have her first solo exhibition with the gallery in April, 2025. On graduating from The Slade School of Art in 2015 she was awarded the Claire Winsten Memorial Award and the Dolbey Travel Grant. In 2017 she was commissioned to make a short film by Channel Four and the ICA for ‘Stop Play Record.’ Smithson was also included in the Official Selection WomenCineMakers Bienniale Edition, 2018 and was part of The Towner International at The Towner, Eastbourne in 2022. https://www.larasmithson.com/
