Yasmin Smith: Sediment

“. . . angophora, sea kelp, and sandstone”


Yasmin Smith’s exhibition, Sediment, is in response to Mosman’s landscape on the land of the Boregegal and Cammeraigal People. During her first site visit, Smith focused on the angophora forests that dominate the edges of land as it reaches down towards Sydney Harbour. Her new work Angophora, 2023, features the ceramic casts of fallen angophora branches gathered (with the help of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Trust) from the headland. Its glaze made from the ash of burnt branches like that of Seine River Basin, 2019.

Perhaps one of Smith’s most well-known works, Seine River Basin, commissioned by the Centre Pompidou and now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, reveals the inner workings of the artist’s research-based practice. Smith collected branches from both in and around the River Seine in Paris, and its tributaries; then made moulds of the branches and cast them in clay. The wood was then burnt to make the ash-glaze that furnish the ceramic sculptures.

Progress image © the artist. Photograph: Elise Fredericksen. Courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney

For more than a decade, Smith’s work has followed a particular methodology. For each project, Smith has had the ash analysed for its chemical content. This process tells the story of the geology of a place and how the natural environment has been impacted by human intervention, such as through farming, mining, or industry. This chemical breakdown reveals the history of these trees which, through their nutrient uptake, have borne witness to generations of human intervention on the landscape. This process is linked to the appearance of the glaze, as the chemical makeup determines the glaze’s colour and texture.

For the first time, Smith is transferring her approach from ceramics and glaze technology to applications in bronze for a new artwork made of and about local sea kelp. True to her research-based methodology, the kelp has been gathered (with the assistance of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science) on-site in Mosman, in Goree (Chowder Bay). It sits low in the gallery, resting on a piece of local sandstone, taken from the seam that runs from the Hawkesbury all the way down to the Southern Highlands. The golden shades of this sandstone are reflected on the gallery walls as the artist has stained them in a paint she has made that uses the Sydney sandstone as its pigment and clay base, immersing the visitor in the landscape itself.

Seaweed collection, Korée, Koree (Chowder Bay). © the artist. Photograph: Elise Fredericksen. Courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney

Smith first used clay she had gathered in this way while in Paris during the making Seine River Basin. She collected a small amount of precious Parisian green clay at a construction site on the slopes of Montmartre, from which she made her own clay alis and painted it onto squares of canvas. The result is a rich, solid painting in a particular shade of pistachio green which I now think I’ve seen everywhere in Paris on my previous visits. I imagine it as a shade of paint I’ve seen in cafes, covering cast iron on bridges and other railings. It’s in apartments and posters.

The three elements of this exhibition – the angophora, sea kelp, and sandstone all form part of the same ecology, and the same nutrient cycle. The angophora grows from the sandstone, their leaves and branches fall into the Harbour, and break down and provide nutrients to the ecosystem of the water, which slowly carves through the sandstone and remakes the topography. Smith reveals these sedimentary layers to the viewer as they become immersed in the exhibition. The interconnectedness of what is on the land and in the water emerges in previous artworks and is echoed in the new works made for Mosman Art Gallery. They reveal how inextricably linked the ecology and geology of Mosman’s terrain is, and the impact European settlement has had on the landscape.

Progress image © the artist. Photograph: Elise Fredericksen. Courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney

Kelly McDonald is a writer and curator based in Sydney.

Mosman Art Gallery
17 June to 10 September 2023
Sydney

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