Sally Smart AM | The Space of Inventory

In Smart’s work the grid has appeared in many forms: the planning of a tree, the map for a ship, the eaves for puppets to hang upon. The grid is a purposely obtuse pattern; as the eye travels unfixedly around its many retreating and converging lines, the grid aestheticises logic and connection in an implied expanse of meaning.

As Rosalind Krauss writes about the centripetal grid:

“The grid is an introjection of the boundaries of the world into the interior of the work; it is a mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself. It is a mode of repetition, the content of which is the conventional nature of art itself.”

In line with this historicity, Smart uses the grid as a theatre upon which to stage the performance of collage and bricolage, alluding to trajectories of pinning hands, legs moving across the studio, and schemes of thought that coalesce in the work itself. As if spreading out the material elements of the collage before their arrangement, Smart’s net of connection bears down upon the construction it contains.

In this most recent iteration, each grid is a printed and repeated pattern, beholden to a second grid created by the cut - formed by the mismatch of lines and duplication of marks, creating a surface of reproduction in which the grid itself has become the material of collage.

Words by Jack Coventry, 2026