FREE Gallery Viewing Hours for Meeting Place with new sculpture by Sydney Smith

Regular Gallery Hours from 12-4 pm on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Free on-site parking available. 493 West Main Street, Building 3, Cheshire, CT.

About the Artist:

Sydney Smith is a sculptor who works in locally sourced wood and found objects to consider how complicated relationships and histories can be communicated through form and material. Her work asks viewers to reconsider the materials around them, not as objects but as forms that hold stories and life.

Smith is based in Hartford, Connecticut. She recently completed a year-long fellowship at Trinity College and a residency at Vermont Studio Center. An emerging artist, Smith has exhibited throughout the Northeast in Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Smith also teaches at Makerspace CT; her three-session Women in the Woodshop course introduces women to woodworking skills and basics in a supportive and open environment.

Artist Statement:

I create large-scale wooden sculptures as a means to question my place within the world. I began this practice after spending time in forests and other natural spaces, noticing the small details of these environments and considering my own existence within ecosystems larger than mine. I manipulate wood found in its large, raw state, into bends and positions that challenge conventional form and test physical and metaphorical extremes of tension, compression, and resistance. I take time with each piece, attending to moments when the wood seems to bring forth its own story, integrating it with my own. The processes of forming and reforming, subtracting and shaping, transform the material toward personal associations, both bodily and emotional.

Natural materials have always fascinated me. Each piece carries its own story, scar, and beauty. When I pick up a piece of wood or stone, I consider it not as inert but as a fellow body, someone full of life, with a past, present, and future. I select off-cuts from firewood piles or trees felled by rot and storms, looking for pieces with stories of their own. I allow the wood to exist in its own skin, embracing cracks, rot, grain patterns in green wood, and insect-made pinholes as part of the sculptural practice. In this way, the ecosystems and ecological histories held within the material are given form. These forms often suggest the body: sometimes my own, sometimes another, queer body, slipping in and out of identification. These pieces become a means of understanding both the natural world and ourselves.