My new artist statement

Below is a copy of my new artist statement. Let me know what you think

Sarah Bell Smith Artist Statement

As a four year old Sarah Bell Smith learnt to sew and whilst at primary school starting selling art and textiles for money. This passion for art and textiles later lead to a full time career as a specialized teacher and artist.

Her inspiration comes from many sources… identity issues, travelling, memories, relationships, personal experiences and nature study. The majority of her work has a message behind it and she hopes people can connect with it on a personal level. Every piece of work begins with extensive research, drawings and samples that all compiled into a journal. These journals become a work of art in themselves.

Sarah’s favorite mediums include fabric, paper and recycled objects combined with hand and free machine stitching. She also likes to work in 3 dimensional areas such as wearable art and sculpture.

Art and textiles are Sarah’s whole life; her practice as an artist is constantly evolving.

Copyright problems

I posted on here not so long ago about my love of a site called Pintrest. I still really like this site but I have become aware what a problem it is for copyright. I found several photos of my own work on this site and nowhere was my name mentioned or my work credited.

Whilst sites like this are great for storing and sharing ideas- copyright must be remembered. Therefore please make sure you always credit the original artist. I always make sure I mention artists names on here if I put images of their work up. I put a message under the photos that were mine on Pintrest just asking people to actually credit me as the artist.

Very cool artwork

I found artwork while looking for something totally different on the net. Funny how that always happens.

The artist is Dalton Ghetti and he carves the leads on pencils into shapes. One pencil can take him 2 years as he only uses a scalpel and a sewing needle. Incredible work.

Too many ideas, never enough time

I've got too many ideas lately about different types of work I want to make. I'm still producing work for the group SAlt and this will continue all year. I had then also initially planned on working on a suite of work for a solo exhibition. Once again however I've been distracted.My current distraction is wearable art. This has been a long time distraction of mine, the trouble is I already have two unfinished garments.

I want to enter a competition (not interested in winning, would just like to get accepted) that would require quite a bit of work. Its not the WOW competition in New Zealand as I don't quite think I'm up to that standard yet. Thats not to say I haven't been planning future ideas for that one as well.

So plans for the moment are

1. -keeping up with new job
2. -wearable art competition (not WOW one)
3. -thinking about WOW wearable art competition
4. -work for SAlt exhibition group
5. -work for several other competitions
6. -work for my own solo exhibitions
7. -writing magazine articles

At this stage I think I'm going to settle on number 1, 2, 4 and possibly 7. 

Never enough time in the day. Ahhhh....  

In love with pintrest

I feel like I am constantly on the internet (my husband says I should have my laptop intravenously connected to my arm) looking at other artists work, lesson plans, etc. I'm now using a new website where I can sort all my research more easily. I'm using it just for lesson plan info at this stage. Below is a screen shot of my pin boards.

You can search for me under Sarah Bell Smith if you want to look at the items I've pinned.

Work going into Pepper Street Exhibition

I found out about a month ago that a piece of my textiles work has been accepted for an exhibition at Pepper Street Gallery (South Australia) titled 'backyard'. My work is based on the circular shapes found in my dad's backyard wood heap. The work is used as the header here on my blog and is also on my business card.

Student work

Below are some samples of the projects my art students are working on. The samples are mine.

This was an exercise we did while studying the elements and 

principles of art and design. This task explored line, shape, 

contrast and pattern.

This is a concertina bound book. My students are making 

versions of them using dyed papers. I will post shortly on 

the dyed paper technique. 

Some students are making flutter books rather than 

concertina bound books.

Blog/life update

I’ve been absent on here off and on for a while as you would have noticed. My new job has taken over my life and I haven’t had time to catch up on my usual activities. I think that is always the case with new jobs when you are getting used to them.

I teach 90% middle school classes and I’m teaching art, textiles and home ec (cooking).

We are an R-12 all girl School so our students range from 5 years old through to 18. The 5 year olds are tiny and very cute.

The school has gorgeous students and are a real pleasure to work with.

When I last posted about what my students were working on, some of this has since changed. As teachers we need to be adaptable and always willing to change/alter curriculum. Some of the projects I planned finished faster than I had envisaged and I decided to alter a few to make them more interesting.

I’ll post some of the photos of the type of work students are doing in the next few days. 

Orizomegami

Orizomegami is the Japanese art of decorating papers by a method of folding and dipping them into dye. It is almost a mix of Origami (the paper folding part) and tie dying. Below is a diagram from a book I photocopied about 10 years ago (have no idea what the book was anymore sorry) and a couple of photos of my dyeing work that I used as samples with my students. 


Now we have finished dyeing our papers we are using them to make covers for accordion bound books.