Berkeley artist Sally Kristina Smith’s adventurous exploration into marrying materials and subject matter uses a variety of innovative processes bearing rich results. In her recent series “calorie project” Smith burns the material she is drawing to make the charcoal used to draw it with, including labeling each piece’s materials as the calories within the substance. In her “Soot” project she harvested soot from experiments at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory aimed at eliminating soot formation. She allows the history and integrity of the materials to shape her art.
The artist says about her work: “The intrigue and anxiety our transience provokes is my springboard for picking up minerals and fibers, carbon and oil. There is a fine line between diamonds and graphite, trees and charcoal, a meteorite and a tube of nickel yellow. I embrace this tenuousness by shaping it in my art."
Sally received her B.A. in music and human biology from Stanford University and earned a law degree from the University of Utah. She studied drawing and painting at the Cambridge Center Studio School in Massachusetts. Smith's work can be found in art collections worldwide including the Hanjin Shipping Company, Seoul, Korea, and private collections in Berlin, Cologne, Zurich, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
