Lydia Smith

Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary, research-based artist invested in witnessing what is marked, lost, and lingers in the aftermath of death. In turn, I am interested in how what we inherit from the past shapes our future trajectories. My work responds to sites with histories of decay or haunting. I imagine each of these subjects as ghostly bodies to access their embedded phenomenological, historical, and subjective knowledge.

 My practice begins in the field, where I utilize a foundational language of drawing to record sensory experiences. I borrow ethnographic strategies from anthropology, folklore, and sociology to collaborate with these locations through walking audits, interviews, and field recordings. Returning to the studio, I apply organizational processes of assemblage, sequencing, and editing to translate what I have collected into hybrid forms of image, performance, and installation. Utilizing the structural apparatus of the map, the archive, and the document, I explore the margins of memory and attempt to communicate felt experience. Abstraction becomes a means to reference the slippery aspects of the unknown, and participation becomes a feminist and anti-colonial intervention. I invite the viewer to activate my work through simple acts like turning a book page or opening a locked briefcase.

BIO
Lydia Smith (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Smith received an MFA from The Ohio State University and a BA from Rice University. She directed Rice’s Matchbox Gallery (2013-2015) and was a member of the artist-run curatorial collective AUTOMAT in Philadelphia, PA (2018-2023). Smith has completed residencies at Stove Works, Vermont Studio Center, The Visual Studies Workshop, Columbus Printed Arts Center, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. In 2015, she was awarded a Watson Fellowship to spend a year traveling outside of the United States to research how the landscape of burial sites reflects cultural attitudes toward death. She was awarded an Ohio State University Fellowship in 2019 and a Global Arts + Humanities Fellowship in 2022. She has exhibited work at Project: ARTspace, The Neon Heater, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Icebox Project Space, stop-gap projects, Roy G Biv, and Urban Arts Space. She has completed public projects at Laurel Hill Cemetery, the Ohio State Libraries, Olde Towne East Arts, and the City of the Dead in Cairo, Egypt. She has also shared her multidisciplinary project, Burial Sites, through public readings and conversations at Two Dollar Radio Headquarters, Ulises, and BasketShop Gallery. She was recently awarded a three-month residency in Dresden, Germany, from the Greater Columbus Arts Council for the summer of 2025. 

Interview with Lydia Smith

Questions by Miranda Holmes

Hi Lydia! Thanks for talking with me. How would you describe your practice? 
I actually often have trouble figuring out the words to describe my practice because it embodies lots of different things. I’ve toyed with a couple of approaches: research-based artist, interdisciplinary artist, multidisciplinary… even anti-disciplinary, or I recently read 'undisciplinary.'  My education taught me that you can (and should) use every tool that you gather in your garden shed to grow your work. And so, I use photography, writing, drawing, space, sculpture, research, and interviewing (listening to people and places) – all to explore a series of questions around place, memory, and time. I studied anthropology in college, and that experience has informed many of the ways I view my studio: I see it as a space that extends beyond just a room in my house, encompassing my city and my work within my community. I borrow many methodologies from anthropology, particularly those that involve witnessing and examining the world as a means of gathering research. My work straddles many different things, but throughout it, there have been constant threads or practices that keep me grounded. One of them has been exploring cemeteries, graveyards, and landscapes of death. 

You worked on the project Burial Sites for over 10 years. Can you tell us about the project and how your practice informed your making of it? 
My project, Burial Sites, documents my visits to cemeteries over the course of 13 years and examines these spaces from multiple angles. I started this project when I was in my early 20s after I'd experienced an intense period of loss in my family. To process my grief, I started drawing a local cemetery. I realized that the cemetery was filled with metaphors, questions, and stories that could be pulled out like threads to examine further. I realized I could apply my training in anthropology to explore the questions I was developing. At the beginning of this project, I was not able to attend a funeral of a family member or visit their grave, so I wondered, can I instead make meaning from the remnants of a stranger’s death? Then I began to ask, where is death materialized? And then secondly, how does the cemetery mirror a place in which it's situated? What are the environmental conditions, and the politics? What can we learn from the people who create, maintain, and visit the cemetery? And then, finally, how are politics and power hierarchies demonstrated in the cemetery? Who gets to be remembered? 

During the stages of examining cemeteries through these questions, the project has taken on multiple forms. First, it started as a drawing project. I was also always taking photos for reference images. Soon, I began creating paintings in response to the maps of each site. Then it evolved away from painting and into a social practice project. I began talking to people, staying with host families as I traveled, and walking with them through the cemeteries. Then I stepped back and reflected on my experiences through writing. Finally, it culminated in a book in which I honored the photographs that I had been making all along. The book serves as a document of the project, but also as a starting point for new conversations. 

Can you talk more about the social practice part of your project?
When studying anthropology, I became excited about conversations that recognize that the researcher is part of the process of making meaning. A researcher is never truly separated from the research - they're also informing it. I think this is obvious to artists, who are always leaving bits of themselves in the material they touch. So then what happens if artists are working with people? 

When I first started visiting cemeteries, I became struck by how these sites could also serve as a place for establishing new, meaningful relationships with the living, as much as the dead. The cemetery can become a bridge for connection. I received grants to travel to different countries and stay with host families. Soon, joking and talking about life at the dinner table with my hosts became part of my studio practice, beyond what I was doing in the cemetery. We discussed life as much as we discussed death. These conversations had a two-way impact on me and my hosts. I came to see that the form of the work is just as much encapsulated in a conversation with someone as it is in a painting. Of course, I'm constantly processing the work into new forms (a book, a drawing, a photograph), but people are involved at different stages. In that sense, I consider the core of the project to be a social relation. 

It’s a way of seeing an artistic practice with a holistic view: seeing how experiences are funneled into a project. Everything is included in the practice, including making dinner for your friend, the emails that you're sending to set up a meeting, the time you're waiting on the bus, and then also, of course, the time that you're dreaming about the drawing you're going to make, making the drawing, and the realizing, oh, maybe the drawing isn't going to be the final thing, but it's leading to something else.

You touched on the different iterations of the project. Now it’s in the form of a book set, Burial Sites. What are the different components of it? 
Burial Sites is an editioned, multi-volume artist book that functions as an encyclopedic atlas or compendium. You might also see the book as a diary. I include photos of every single cemetery that I visited over the past 13 years. Similar to making a collage, I grouped the images together and intentionally laid them out to map my memories of each site. The books also include writing in the form of field notes and essays that process the questions I had while working on the project. Beyond the seventeen-pound book object, Burial Sites also takes the form of a website and an exhibition. The website allows people to experience the book if they don't have access to a physical copy. It’s open and available to anyone and can be encountered by people I might never meet. (www.burialsitesbook.com) It also exists as a singular larger handbound book that can be laid out on a long table in an exhibition space, allowing it to be experienced in a public context. In this form, it recreates the experiences I had sitting around the dinner table talking about death with my family growing up. I think this installation form is the most effective because strangers start to ask big questions together in a public setting.

Can you give us some insight into some of the sites you visited? What experiences or images in the book stick out to you? 
There are 14 different countries that are represented in the book, and they all have cemeteries from very different environments and religions. Some of the countries I visited were Japan, Egypt, Argentina, Australia, and Sweden, and I chose many of these countries because of the diverse contexts they presented. 

One example of a cemetery that I was really excited to visit and chose purposefully was the City of the Dead in Cairo, Egypt. It’s a giant necropolis in the center of the city. In the book, my images depict my walks through Cairo as I attempt to understand the site's significance within the broader context of the city. I was drawn to the City of the Dead’s complex history; it's also a place where many people actively reside among the graves. There's a post office, a school, and many craftsmen living in the area. In the book, there's a series of photos that show close-ups of crafts and people working on projects in the cemetery, who are using it as their workspace. Since it’s among the dead, though, it's this taboo thing. So in the book, you're looking through these images of giant mausoleums, and then suddenly you find a series of images of a man using the long, quiet alleyways of the necropolis to make silk thread. There's also an image of a man who's blowing glass in a small shop in the middle of the cemetery, and his family has been doing that for generations. 

These kinds of surprises in your book underline that the cemetery’s not a passive environment. It's very active. 
Another cemetery that sticks out to me is in Sweden, where everyone's pretty much an agnostic, and so they're not choosing to have stones at all. There are no monuments. There's nothing to take care of. There are plots of large forest or garden where the ashes are scattered. Simultaneously, there is an entire natural ecosystem of plants and animals that then also cohabitate this space of the dead. So these images in the book present contrasting ways of approaching life through the creation of monuments after death. 

Sustaining our attention and energy on a project can be challenging, but you’ve worked on this for about 10 years. Did you ever expect this project to sustain you for so long? What have you learned along the way while working on a slower timeline?
It's interesting because this project actually started when I was an undergraduate student while simultaneously learning new ideas about what art is and can be. Since then, my work and life have undergone numerous changes, and the project reflects a significant period of transformation in my life. When I created the initial drawings of the cemetery in France, where this project began, I didn't anticipate continuing it. I was just making. However, I then found the cemetery to be something that continuously grasped my attention. I realized there's always a cemetery nearby, so it became a tool or a grounding mechanism for me to enter a new project or learn about the cemetery’s surrounding culture. As I worked on that project, I felt a sense of freedom and euphoria while walking through these places and seeing all the connections around me. I started actively looking for other opportunities to research this topic. Everyone has a connection to a cemetery because we all die. As long as there are people, there will also be some version of these places. 

I’m still trying to find closure on this project, but I find myself returning to these sites because a new angle is constantly emerging. These questions about death are among the most profound questions we face in life: How are we remembered? How are our lives seen by others after we're gone? Is it possible to make sense of a life that begins and ends, and where does that materialize? That's a big question that's never answered. So it feels like the project is never done for me until I die. 

Sustaining your attention on this also speaks to your quality of presence. It could be really simple for an artist to say, Okay, I made a series of paintings around this, and now I can just move on to another subject or another question or series. But you were really present throughout this process. You saw you could go deeper and keep questioning what you already had in front of you rather than chasing something new. 
It’s both easy and hard to keep going at something. I struggled for some time to articulate the work confidently. The project was about making relationships, walking, witnessing the world, and being present. How do you put that in a form? It took me a really long time to realize that what I just described is the form. It’s a social practice. But I also (stubbornly) want to find a way to tie it all in a bow. Even with the book, the website, and all the iterations it’s gone through, I'm not satisfied. They're still missing a lot… so there is potentially more to do here. 

Maybe that's just me as an artist! My biggest question is, how do you communicate experience? You can’t really! And so, this usually means creating opportunities for new experiences in my work. There are always more experiences to be had and more things to create. 

I keep being pulled back to the cemetery. I was in a residency last summer, and I was committed to starting a new project about an entirely new topic. And I show up, I drive into the residency parking lot, and across the street is a giant cemetery. And it's just like, Okay, I have to make a drawing about that now, or some kind of work. I have to go take a walk there. I have to spend time there. I need to understand what this site is because it's right there next to me.

You can't escape it!
It actually really helped me ground myself in this new location I'd never been in. By walking through that site, I learned a great deal about where I was and who I was at that particular moment. To me, there's also maybe a slowness here that I'm committing to as well.

I wanted to bring in this theme of pace. When I think about ecological justice, I think about time. Geological time is unfathomable to us as we experience human time. Developing new technologies that protect the earth takes years, but there’s an emergency around figuring it out now. There’s urgency for justice for people living today, too, as we witness mass migration occurring. So there's this tension between a long period of time working together and taking swift action. I see this project as being able to hold those two things. You’ve sustained this project over years, but you're also very urgent in the way that you make; you're trying a lot of different iterations. How else are you thinking about pacing?
There's pressure on artists to make new work and always put work out there. That’s intense. It’s set on us by the systems we live in. Our attention is very short, and we are expected to be productive all the time; these expectations are, of course, tied to the pressures of capitalism. I am glad I spent so much time on this project because I was able to find something I was truly excited about sharing with the world. Even once I found that form in the book, it took me a while to figure out where I wanted that form to live in the world. That felt like a very deep decision. It felt uncomfortable for me because I felt pressure to share it with everybody and publicize it, and time is ticking away. 

I learned from that process that I can determine my own pace, and that slowness is valuable. Slowness doesn't mean not committing to the work or not working hard. It just means trusting the work to be ready when it's time to be ready. 

I wonder if ghosts, haunting, and the process of honoring what came before us relates to the climate crisis, too. In both ways, we’re inheriting a lot of history, baggage. What do we do with it now? 
A significant question in my work concerns inheritance. What do we inherit from the dead? In a cemetery, you don’t see the physical remnants of a body; it’s just a stone representing one. But at the same time, the dead have left behind all the architecture we inhabit, the language we speak, the political systems we employ, the recipes we use to prepare food, everything. There's also power in realizing that we have the capacity to change those systems and leave something better for the people who come next. 

My next project will be exploring the topic of ruins. I am interested in the ruin as a site for possibility and imagination. I am traveling to Dresden, Germany, this summer to examine the literal remnants of ruins, as well as how the metaphorical ruins of the past have been reconciled. Dresden is interesting because its old city was in ruins after World War II and remained that way for many years during the communist era. It wasn’t until 2000 that they decided to rebuild, opting to replicate the facades of the old architecture rather than starting from scratch. I find this to be a powerful example and question to explore: do we let go or do we preserve? If our climate and governmental structures are in ruins, what opportunities does this present? How do we take what we have inherited from the past and let it go, or decide to rebuild it? But, also, how do we not forget, in order not to repeat past violence? How do we move forward with effective change? 

Thank you so much for sharing your work and talking with us!

To find out more about Lydia’s work, check out her website.