Brian Smith

Lives and works in Portland, ME, USA

Artist statement

My practice centers on sculpture and the slow accumulation of materials through repetitive processes. Through beading, mosaic, chain wrapping, and other labor-intensive methods, I build hybrid figures that imagine a future shaped by rising waters and ecological change. Beads, fragments of mosaic, lengths of chain, and hand-built surfaces accumulate into dense textures that recall coral reefs, shells, and barnacled growth. I am drawn to processes that require sustained repetition, allowing labor to remain visible within the object. My pictorial bead nets exist somewhere between sculpture, textile, and drawing. Across the work, imagery becomes a sculptural material, embedded within mosaics, beadwork, and textured forms. Driving the work is an interest in queer ecology, hybridization, and the boundaries between bodies and environments. I envision speculative futures and invented mythologies to consider how humans might evolve alongside changing ecosystems. Rather than treating ecological change solely as an endpoint, I use these imagined futures to think through adaptation and interdependence, and the ways identity, ecology, and form remain in states of ongoing change.

Artwork