Sally Smart

Sally Smart

Pedagogical Puppet Project

Greenaway Art Gallery

3^rd April until May 5th

The Pedagogical Puppet Project, showing at Greenaway Gallery, is a new body of work by artist Sally Smart, looking at deconstruction and reconstruction of ideas and images. Smart uses collage, but not in a primary school cut and paste kind of way, she somehow makes it no so kitsch. She produces large-scale wall installations; constructing a scene through an assortment of images, silk-screened fabrics, felt and pins. For this project, her practice has taken a turn towards performance works, and the use of puppets, which introduce the element of time.

Within the work Smart to takes on a Doctor Frankenstein role. She splices and constructs, stitching together bodies from disparate pieces. The characters are uneasy, mutated and unstable. For the Pedagogical Puppet Project, Smart has included a text element that sits alongside the collages within the tableau. They relate to pedagogy, the painted black walls reference schoolroom blackboards and the smell of chalk dust. These texts act in a similar way to the collage, they are constructed from stitching together ideas and, like the images, form a space that is uneasy and un-whole. By breaking things down Smart is able to reconsider and even re-inscribe concepts that are often considered fixed.

IMAGES

1. Sally Smart, Choreographing Collage/I Build My Time (detail), 2013, synthetic polymer paint on canvas with various collage elements, size and elements variable

2. Sally Smart, The Pedagogical Puppet Projects, installation view at Greenaway Art Gallery, 2013

3. Sally Smart, Choreographing Collage #1 (Pedagogical Puppet series), 2012, digital photograph, 65.5. x 65.5.cm, Ed 5 + 2 AP

All images courtesy the artist and Greenaway Art Gallery

TEXT:  Copyright Adele Sliuzas, originally published on the thousands