Kirsty Smith is a contemporary artist working and living in the west of Shetland. In 2021 she graduated with a Fine Arts degree from the University of the Highlands and Islands. Her practice utilises drawing, object-making and sculpture to strengthen and define our relationship with the actuality of place.
Her exhibited work is grounded in the notion of watery futures and the changing relations between us, the environment, and water. It has been developed with close observation of burns, lochs, bogs and sea, and successive experimentation with glass, stone, metal and wood. The materials used are repurposed, with stone sourced from industrial and infrastructure sites around the isles. Sculpture and drawing use the forms of fluid dynamics to intertwine primitive ruins and the new reality of hyper-connectivity, pipelines, new energy and deep-sea cables.
The work seeks to look at the surrounding environment to visualise a realistic future for the isles on the cusp of global warming and the threatening change of the gulf stream.
