Terry smith

Caracas, Venezuela 2013

sculpture | intervention | performance | collaboration

PRACTICE

I have always been interested in drawing and writing and I am obsessed with measurement and repetition and breaking things up, deconstructing them in an effort to understand them…. sometimes they stay broken.

In all my work, from text to drawing and performance and sculpture and video there is something broken and disruptive and something that is deconstructed and remade. 

I am simply curious about the world and I make my best efforts to try to understand what I am doing here, and what to do with myself now that I am here.

Art for me is a process of thinking, feeling and sharing.

BACKGROUND

Since 1995 I have worked full time as an artist, working in the margins of the education and the commercial and museum world.

My work first came to public attention, ironically, for work made in secret. When in 1994, I was denied permission to create installations in a series of derelict houses in East London, I did not accept the decision, so I broke into the buildings and did the work illegally. 

Since those secret works in Leytonstone, I went on to make projects at the British Museum in 1995 and at The Bankside Power station, during the refurbishment and transformation into Tate Modern in 1996. 

Most of my installations and performances have been largely outside the UK and include projects in South America Including, Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas,  Museo X-Tersea, Mexico City and MACBA in Barcelona.

Solo Exhibitions include: Fault Line, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City (1999), Marking Time, Lux Gallery, London (2000) and Parallax at the John Hansard Gallery (2011) and The Drawing Center in NY (2013) 

Publications include: 2000 Marking time. Nuova Icona, Venice; Parallax at the John Hansard Gallery (2011) and Site Unseen (1997) and The Foundling (2009)

Awards: Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1997)  The Paul Hamlyn Award (2008)

FULL CV  FULL BIO

I don’t need to name my work to myself. I draw, write, photograph, deconstruct, film and direct. I use words, images, lights, movements, objects and pictures to realise ideas, assumptions, propositions and release the imagination. My plan is to make it through the day and my ambition is to have another day to play with.

With regard to performance work it began when I was 16 in 1972 restarted again 1974 and only really surfaced again in 2008. So this journey was on pause for over 30 years. But I sure about one thing I am an artist not a choreographer, nor a composer, nor a designer I just happen to work across all media. Perhaps I trespass, well, I believe in free speech and freedom of movement so I see it as my right to walk anywhere and say anything.

In an around 1972 when just 16 and in my final year at school. I saw the musical Hair on the London stage, I saw an Ed Kienholz show at the ICA and by accident saw the work of Anthony Caro. In 1974 I held performance workshops as a student at Goldsmith’s and in the same year heard speaking live in London, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Joseph Beuys. And I also was taught film making by Dereck Jarman.

I loved every moment of being at art school. However in 1977 I took a year out to earn money to pay for my final year. I worked as an usher at the National Theatre and saw hundreds of shows. I continued to work full time in the evenings even during my final year. At the end of my year away I managed to get a commission from Artscribe to co-write an article with another student John Wallet. We visited as many degree shows as possible and reported on the state of play in art schools at that time, called BA Means Goodbye it was published in 1978.

Since 2012 I have been slowly working up the courage to work again in live art. I am watching reading and seeing as much dance as I can. Martha Graham, the Judson Dance Theater, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Kenneth MacMillian, William Forsythe, Wayne McGregor, Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Dimitris Papaioannou to mention just a few.