Matt Smith

Artist Statement

The core of my practice is infiltrating establishment organisations and shifting their – and their visitors’ – points of reference. Using techniques of institutional critique, artist intervention and reappropriation, the familiar is made unfamiliar and power structures are brought to light. Using craft, with its connotations of the amateur, accessibility and gender and exploiting its place in the art world, the pieces both celebrate the mainstream and also unsettle it, taking objects from their intended role and repurposing them in new situations – creating a visual polari. “Ingeniously producing objects that are both reassuringly familiar and strangely new, vibrant and multifaceted, Matt's works are, in the end, irreverent reinterpretations of the ideas of kitsch - clichés that are first emptied, then filled again with ever more loaded meaning.” Oliver Winchester, Curator, Victoria and Albert Museum