Di Smith
I am an artist and gallery owner and am in awe of, and inspired by creative people, whom I am lucky enough to meet and interact with almost every day.
“If I had a wish for the world it would be to have every person, create something.
In order to grow, to learn, to understand, to respect and value, we need to create.
I pick up things, almost every day, – wood, metal, seeds, stones, rusty bits, bones, teeth, glass, feathers, washers, nails, boxes, tins, wire, and bits and pieces I find every day where ever I am.
I cannot explain what attracts me to each piece, perhaps it is the shape, their rust, their history, their essence or just that they once existed in another time and place.
Life, death and everything in between can all be expressed in materials like drift wood, bones, rusty metal, discarded brick, glass, keys, teeth, seeds ……
I live with my collection for sometime before I have the impulse to create something. They lie together in hand-woven baskets from Zimbabwe, they mingle, and as we live together they start to tell me their story.
When I put them together they seem to interact in a way I don’t always understand,  yet feel deeply about, their histories come together and make something new.
Somehow this newness from oldness puts it all into perspective for me.
Some of my sculpture incorporates new, (like ceramic), with found objects and often has an element of organic and inorganic.
My painting is usually an expression of current events in my life, things I feel strongly about. I am a self-taught artist and always experiment with a combination of media including paint, wood stain,  threads, bees-wax, collage, photography, building materials etc. I love to incorporate technology into the work and so make use of photography, Photoshop, digital printing. All I really want is to continuously get lost in the process and I would love my work to evoke some thought and comment by the viewer.”
