Working in her home studio while her two young kids were learning remotely due to Covid-19 school shutdowns, Smith began this series of paintings in March 2020. The process of creating these paintings served as both a coping mechanism and a means for creative expression when the pandemic, racial protests, and political turmoil were dominating the news cycle and the collective consciousness.

This body of work and Smith’s realizations making it were recently covered in an article in the Leo Weekly. A quote from the article by Erica Rucker: “When the pandemic happened, Smith began to look at her art in a different way. It was a hard way to reach deeper into herself and give herself some certainty in a world that had very little of that.”

Using the art materials she had on hand, Smith used both ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ media such as ink, watercolor, gouache, colored pencils, and pastels to create paintings on handmade paper. Inspired by sacred geometry, tantric art, weavings from the Bauhaus, and mystic artists such as Hilma af Klimt, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Pelton, Smith used mixed media techniques to create a ‘ground’ for the paintings and geometric and organic shapes to create abstract compositions.

The exhibition’s title is a nod to Hilma af Klimt, a Swedish artist who communicated with spirits and developed her own symbolic language to create radical abstract paintings in the early twentieth century.

Press release and images via Fifteen Twelve, Portland.