Lydia Smith’s practice begins without certainty.

She works through automatism, allowing intuition to lead before language and logic intervene. Rather than starting with fixed outcomes, she allows research, thoughts and lived experiences to surface through the act of making. This openness is essential to how she works. It creates space for the unconscious and for ideas to emerge through the material rather than be imposed upon it.

She works across sculpture, works on paper, and digital media, often moving fluidly between them. Clay, plaster, bronze, scans, code, and prints are not separate stages but interconnected states. Each informs the other. What begins as a gesture in the hand may later become data, a digital artefact, or a two-dimensional blueprint. She is interested in this movement between forms and in how meaning shifts as material is translated.

At the core of Smith’s practice is an ongoing inquiry into human connection. She is drawn to the ways ancient beliefs, technological systems, scientific inquiry, and spiritual experience intersect. Across history, humans have turned to ritual, measurement, myth, and now data to map the self. She sees contemporary technology not as a break from this lineage, but as another chapter within it.

From this perspective, Smith explores the hidden systems that shape who we are. Some of these systems are internal, including subconscious conditioning, instinct and inherited behaviour. Others are external, including social structures and economic forces.  She is interested in where these systems overlap and in questioning where instinct ends and identity begins.

Smith questions how much of who we are is chosen and how much is coded, biologically, culturally, or perhaps digitally?

Geometry often emerges within her work as a quiet organising force. Lines repeat, split, and reemerge across both physical and digital space. There is a dialogue between line and form, and between intuition and structure. As she moves from her hands to software and back again, a language develops that interprets the oscillation between thought and material. The finished works often hold a sense of balance and tension, inviting a pause.

Sculpture, for Smith, is grounding. It anchors her in time and space when so much contemporary experience is mediated through screens; clay allows her to remain tactile and connected to a material that stretches back throughout human culture. One might assume that incorporating digital experiments would create opposing states. However, to Smith, they often reveal organic shapes and symbols that mirror logograms, linking her again to the natural world. She is interested in the space where physical bodies coexist with digital profiles and data traces. Her practice becomes a way to negotiate this tension, commanding presence and observation across both tactile and virtual realms.

Smith’s printed digital DNA blueprints that accompany each sculpture are central to her exploration. They symbolise the reality that we are no longer separate from our digital identities. Physical and digital selves are increasingly intertwined, each shaping the other in subtle but profound ways. Online representations influence how we are perceived and how we interpret the world, while physical experiences feed digital spaces through the curation of images and language.

These prints also reflect a dimensional shift. As three-dimensional beings, we now perform large parts of our lives in two dimensions through interfaces and flattened representations. The movement of her sculptures between three and two dimensions mirrors this condition. It asks what is lost, gained, or transformed in translation, and how far this process might go in the formation of the self.

Throughout her practice, Smith returns to questions of heritage and permanence. What do we give value to now, the physical object or identity, or its digital counterpart? What endures, the material form, the data record, or experience held in memory?

Smith’s work invites viewers to consider their own position within these shifting realities and how they show up in each space. She invites them to notice how deeply lives are entangled with systems both seen and unseen, and to reflect on the nuance of each realm.

She hopes the viewer will pause and reflect on the structures that shape us and the quiet moments where we find ourselves. Through making, she attempts to hold complexity and contradiction in alignment and to create works that are grounded, open, and reflective of the evolving world we inhabit.

Identity Stretch DNA Blueprint by Lydia Smith