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Shelly Goldsmith

Ramsgate, Kent
Artist working with textile based media.Reader in Textiles, University for the Creative Arts
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Shelly Goldsmith  has exhibited at major galleries and  museums in Britain, Europe, USA and Japan, her work is in many notable public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum. 

 

Goldsmith is the recipient of the Jerwood Prize and in 2020 was awarded the Vlieseline Fine Art Textile Award, an international prize which recognises concept driven and gallery context textiles.

 

Goldsmith’s practice investigates the power of cloth and worn clothing as a rich landscape for expression, a place to explore and communicate ideas. With a feminist viewpoint she unpicks established psychological theory to better understand human interactions, how we live our life and what shapes us.  Taking an autoethnographic approach her  position is both personal and parsing, discarded textiles become witness and memoranda; using our clothes as a place we inhabit as home, psychologically and physically. At every turn our world presents evidence of this truly ‘mobile home’, living life in cloth, from ordinary day-to-day routines and ceremony like weddings to powerfully emotive life events, such as migration and displacement. Newly emerging work explores familial female experience, transactional analysis, and intergenerational trauma.

 

Working mostly with three textile methods, Goldsmith utilises technological and historical techniques simultaneously; digital and hand dye-sublimation printing - digital and hand stitch and hand-woven tapestry, produced to maximise its woven qualities, where warp becomes a potent element of expression.  

 

Goldsmith’s narrative-based work is presented as gallery based installations becoming  potent landscapes of psychogeograpies as she aim's to explore and present the evocative force of cloth and conscience and our inner and outer world. 

 

Work is conceived and produced with sustainability at its heart, using recycled and repurposed cloth, especially reclaimed polyesters,  putting them to good use as creative ambassadors in our world.

 

Practice is underpinned by collaborations with Psychiatry and Forensic Science professionals and supported by awards from Arts Council England, Wellcome Trust etc. Goldsmith’s work is written about and cited extensively in books and journals. Shelly Goldsmith is ‘Emerita Reader in Textiles, University for the Creative Arts. 

 

I am an experienced teacher and take every opportunity to disseminate and share my research and practice outcomes and aim to facilitate the creativity of others through a strongly reflective approach where students are co-learners, co-creators.  I have taught in the UK, Australia, Japan and Oslo, predominantly undergraduate and postgraduate delivery, I have some experience of supporting Research Degrees.  I founded the pioneering Textile Art Department at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton- I directed the BA (Hons) Textile Art and MA Degree in Textiles Practice and Theory. I am currently Reader in Textiles at UCA where I teach across fashion and textiles progs.   I am often asked to contribute to selection panels and sit on juries for competitions, grants, prizes/awards.

 

Locus of the Dress Publication - Introduction (printed on a head scarf)

By  Shelly Goldsmith

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