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To artist Sally Smart, histories, identities and bodies are complex, multi-layered and shifting. Comprised of a mass of fragments that are forever being reordered and rearranged to forge new meanings and modes of understanding, they are constructions that are never complete and always subject to variation. Since the mid-1990s, Smart has been developing ways of representing this dynamic and performative process both conceptually and formally. Through her cut-outs, large scale assemblage installations and wall tableaux, Smart explores and eloquently articulates the complexities of these processes in a visual language that is at once engaging and challenging.
An intricate series of formal and conceptual associations is brought together in Smart’s most recent work, The Exquisite Pirate (2004-2006). The concept of the female pirate as a metaphor for issues of identity, hybridity, immigration and globalisation forms the core of this multifaceted assemblage which was shown this year in New York at Postmasters Gallery and in the ‘2006 Contemporary Commonwealth’ exhibition at Melbourne’s NGV Australia. Smart has been investigating the theme of women pirates since 2003 when she began to delve into their neglected histories. The traditionally masculine realm of piracy is feminised in The Exquisite Pirate via a critical and self-conscious engagement with a variety of materials and reconstructed imagery. Magnificent galleons, bleeding oceans, sea monsters and pirates are pieced together out of fragments of painted and screenprinted canvas, fabrics and photographic reproductions. Traditional pirate motifs like skulls and cross-bones are evident, but are reconfigured and shifted to a feminine domain in which ropes are formed out of plaits, masses of curling wet hair fly from flagpoles and ships are adorned with gingham. The metaphorical resonances of the woman-pirate-artist nexus are particularly... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline