ARTiculAction Art Review - Special Issuue Aug. 2016 | Page 185

Suzanne Smith

ICUL CTION
C o n t e m p o r a r y

A r t

R e v i e w

Special Issue

anyone else's. If you're not challenging
something you're supporting the status
quo and both positions are as political
as each other. I now teach art and
design in secondary schools and work
really hard to contextualise art and
design's agency in the world, rather
than framing it as an vaguely pleasing
past-time.
Your approach coherently
encapsulates several disciplines and
you work with a variety of materials
including text, found objects,
photography, film and found image
revealing an organic investigation
about the tension between mundanity
and the abstract nature of social
norms and the results convey together
a coherent and consistent sense of
harmony and unity. Before starting to
elaborate about your production, we
would suggest to our readers to visit
http://www.suzannesmith.me in order
to get a synoptic view of your
multifaceted artistic production: When
walking our readers through your
usual process, we would like to ask you
if you have you ever happened to
realize that such multidisciplinary
approach is the only way to express
and convey the idea you explore.

I can't imagine it being any other way. I
don't feel very invested in any
particular medium - I enjoy making but,
for me, the idea dictates the
presentation. I see the medium as craft
and the ideas-based use of it as art.The
medium is very much another layer of
meaning with possibilities and
parameters. It's never been a conscious
decision to work in a multidisciplinary
way it's more a matter of becoming

intrigued by something recurring in my
environment and then I start gathering
evidence...photographs of the sculpting
of a specific type of garden plant, a list
of lazy punchlines, a collection of preowned kitchen canisters. The collecting
becomes part of a thought process that
helps me play, and pinpoint what
exactly it is that interests me. Then the
possibilities open up.
At the heart of it is collage. I'm basically
gathering, sorting, editing and
representing.
For this special edition of
ARTiculAction we have selected
Unconditional, an interesting film that
our readers have already started to get
to know in the introductory pages of
this article. While walking our readers
through the genesis of this project,
would you shed light on the way your
main source of inspirations?

Unconditional is unusual for me in that
it didn't start as art at all. I was doing
teacher training and had done quite a
bad drawing of Tilda Swinton as part of
a portraiture project with the kids. My
non-artist boyfriend at the time thought
it was a) very good and b) Sting. He
was wrong on both counts. I intended to
spend about five minutes making a silly
film to make my sister laugh - just a
flashing image film and the phrase I
love you.
However, the more I declared my love,
the more it tickled me. The
accumulation of love and intensity and
mania was really stimulating. The more
I pushed it the more interested I
became in it. The insistence,

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