Beth Smith

Beth Smith is a Sydney based artist, who blurs the barriers between painting and printmaking. Considering herself as a painter, her practice largely involves using her own body as the brush, applying paint onto her body and imprinting this onto a surface. Through this Smith aims to explore how the body of the artist can be the subject, author and tool while challenging past representations of the female in painting.

Although this is a focus of Smith’s, her practice also involves experimentation of mediums through drawing, ceramics and traditional forms of printmaking where she looks to the simplicity and beauty surrounding her, allowing it to be about the process and making. Even in this part of Smith’s practice, her painting traits and gestures are embedded within her making.

Smith completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours at The University of New South Wales, Art & Design back in 2018.  Since then she has been working as an Art Facilitator in the disability sector, in which she supports others in their own creative expression.

#5, #15, #28 | Buttprint Prints (series of three), 2021, screen print, 21x29.7cm, $200 (each).

These works take a body print of mine and turn them into a more traditional print, flattening the female form into abstract shapes and patterns while focusing on colour, lines and repetition. This aims to address notions that come with abstracting your own body as the subject. Although these prints are clunky and messy with gaps and marks I think this acts as a subtle reflection as to the imperfections of our bodies and the beauty with that. 

#29 | Figure, 2021, screen print, 21x29.7cm, $200.

This edition of Figure anciently cuts off the top section of the figures head. The image is a drawing of mine which I have turned into a screen print, as I like to use my own hand within the image transfer process. I have always found it difficult to draw faces of a figure, so while this is a ‘misprint’ I think there is a nice relationship between it and my drawing practice. Within my practice there is often a theme representing the figure, aiming to steer the observer away for any preconceived notions or sexual connotations, but rather making the figure as something that ‘is’.