Yasmin Smith: Elemental Life

Yasmin Smith (b.1984, Sydney) creates ambitious ceramic sculptural installations through a combination of field research, community collaboration and technical experimentation.

Key to Smith’s practice is her analysis and burning of mineral and plant materials to create glazes for her ceramic forms. These glazes bear unique chemical traces that, through her work, articulate the history, ecology and geology of different environments. Smith has been building an archive of site-specific glazes since 2014, describing it as an ‘alternative knowledge system’ for understanding and comparing landscapes.

Yasmin Smith: Elemental Life, the most significant museum presentation of her work to date, features the major wall-based ceramic installation Seine River Basin (2019) from the MCA collection, alongside new and recent works that are thematically tied together in their investigations of waterways, river systems and deep geological time. Presenting an alternative understanding of combined human and environmental histories, Smith’s thought-provoking works invite us to engage with our surroundings in new ways, and consider our relationship to and impact on the natural world.