From the artist

The invitation to place my work in the context of drawing was irresistible. 

For some years, I have situated my work as interventions in public space. I have created video works informed by silent cinema, made flat compositions of landscapes with a solitary figure gesturing ad infinitum. I use an absurdist narrative structure, creating an open-ended space where viewers can hang something from their own well of sentiment.

I cherish using props, often plucked from the everyday, as an entry point for birthing a bizarre ritual. They are a collected auto-topography, a landscape of the self. On reflection, many were used to make marks, graffiti on walls, lipstick on tree trunks, and dust gathered and moved around with a broom.

In Naarm, 2020 and 2021, we were mostly in lockdown. I did not realise until this time how much I missed working in the landscape. Moving through it and feeling the expanse of the sky is an important part of my practice. Walking and running through the landscape is an escape act, a quicksilver way to evade getting stuck in oppressive tropes, in reality. In my works, the performing figure runs out of frame, and the trace is all that remains. 

Tania Lou Smith, February 2023

Moving Freely (Video Still), 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.

Artist talk

Listen to Tania Lou Smith in conversation with MOVING FREELY exhibition curator, Belinda Yee in the gallery on Saturday 8 July, 2023.

Download the exhibition catalogue as a pdf

Biography

Tania Lou Smith is a performance artist with a multi-disciplinary practice incorporating live performance, photography, video and costume. Her videos are mostly playful, performative interventions in public space. Themes in her practice include the comic anti-hero, domestic labour and care work, drudgery and absurdist humour. 

Tania Lou Smith has exhibited in the United States, Serbia, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan and across Australia. She has trained in performance under US composer/dancer Meredith Monk and received funding for her work from the Australia Council for the Arts, City of Melbourne, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Arts ACT. In 2014 she completed a Master of Fine Art by research at Monash University under the supervision of Professor Anne Marsh, which was titled "Funny and Feminist: Performing the Comic Anti-Hero".

Essay

In Untitled (running) Tania Lou Smith has found another way to make work about the endless, draining cycles of labour associated with motherhood while also offering some apparent breathing space. A woman runs through the landscape, trailing a long piece of black fabric behind her. She is barefoot, evoking a visceral feeling of touch as her feet strike both urban and rural landscapes. She never reaches a destination, running through the same landscapes again and again, not once arriving at an ending.

Is she running towards a goal or away from a chore? Is there a destination in mind or is she mindlessly escaping? Is there joy in the physical exertion of running or is it simply labour, traversing the terrain? These unresolved tensions in Smith’s work are a representation of the push/pull nature of parenting, especially parenting while also trying to have an art practice.

This is not an ode to the joy of running. There is no feeling of freedom, timelessness or elation. Instead, whether you read Smith as running to or running from, this is labour endlessly repeated, exhausting and unrewarding. There is a sense of urgency to her motion, jobs unfinished, time closing in without any prospect of relief, finality or closure. Her black dress is far from the sleek running gear of the exercise world, it is a practical working garment, designed to take a mother into all her various spaces.

The long trailing piece of material is drawn out behind Smith by the friction of the surfaces it covers. In the tradition of Robert Long’s A line made by walking (1967) the fabric draws a line behind her, visible both as the piece of fabric and as the trace it leaves behind. What does this line do, what does it tell us? It can be read as analogous to the line left on Smith’s life and spirit by the burden carried, the weight, responsibilities and tasks of motherhood. It is not a decorative line, drawn for pleasure, rather it is dragged through the landscape, over grass and cement, wet and dry. No doubt there is a corresponding mark left on the fabric.

To make Untitled (running) Smith adopted a new mode of filming into her practice. At the time she was making Untitled (running) Smith was caring for both her pre-school child and her elderly mother. With no childcare available she co-opted the services of her partner to act as simultaneous filmmaker and child minder. He took tracking shots from either a car with the child in the back seat or from a camera mounted on the child’s pram. Thus can motherhood permeate all aspects of an artist’s life.

For Smith the tracking shot is also reminiscent of early cinematic chase scenes and silent cinema has always been a key stylistic influence in her work. Other influences she cites include Sturtevant’s Finite Infinite (2010) where the “unresolved, repetitious narrative left the viewer feeling exhausted and catching their breath”[1] and that influence can be clearly felt in Untitled (running). The other influence Smith mentions is Takeshi Kitano’s film Dolls where two of the characters spend the film connected by a rope of plaited red fabric. Smith’s use of her black fabric evokes both the closeness of the child attached by the metaphorical apron strings and the distance forced on us all by the fabric masks we wore during the Covid pandemic. Once again there is a tension between dual elements that leave the viewer to weave their own way through the experience of watching Untitled (running).

[1] Artist’s own words

© Fiona Henderson, February 2023

Curator’s Notes

A duration between two points

One foot in front of the other, moving the body through space, the air brushing past your cheek. Each step impresses a mark in the sand and as it is lifted a trace remains, evidence of having been in that place at that time. But even without a visible trace, the action has still occurred. It is near impossible to be in a place without leaving a trace, an interruption, a re-orientation of existing forces, the rearrangement of small particles. Sometimes the change is small and sometimes significant. Sometimes the effect is positive and at other times devastating. This is drawing – the trace we leave, whether we do it consciously or not.

DRAW Space, a platform dedicated to experimental drawing and new drawing research, is collaborating with Tania Lou Smith to produce the exhibition Moving Freely. The collaboration began with a curatorial provocation prompting Smith to explore the ways in which her practice as a performance artist, might be drawing. This provocation allowed Smith to develop a new body of work by reconsidering the nature of both performance and drawing. For DRAW Space, it initiates a conversation around the idea of movement as drawing.

To draw is to make a mark, to push a pencil forward on the page, but also to move forward in time, it is both spatial and temporal. Drawing is a simple pleasure, a fundamental act of communication and much like breathing, thinking, and moving, the capacity to draw is universal. At the core of drawing is the line, which can be perceived as the duration between two points. Tim Ingold, a social anthropologist and self-proclaimed enthusiast of lines, suggests leading life is in itself, a form of drawing[1] That is, to move through space and time along an unfolding and unknowable trajectory, is to draw.

The idea for this exhibition came from seeing Smith's earlier works, Untitled (pusher) 2020, a video of Smith pushing a pram around an empty amphitheatre; and Untitled (walking) 2017, a close-up video of Smith in high heels navigating sand dunes, fences and desks.[2] In these, and Smith’s serial photographic works, there is a clear sense of line. They show Smith dragging, pushing or struggling, sometimes her movement is hurried and clumsy, at other times laboured and stilted. The presence of props; a pram; a large bag; or unwieldy fabric — amplifies the exertion of Smith’s body. In this way Smith imparts each imagined line with a feeling, be it hurried and scribbled or rough and laboured. In broader terms, Smith is reflecting on the experience of being at once a woman, mother, and worker. These works, blending elements of vaudeville and feminist inquiry, showcase Smith using her body's comedic potential to explore important autobiographical themes and in the context of an exhibition at DRAW Space, to consider the idea of movement as drawing.

The body in Smith’s earlier works marks out a bold composition against a graphic, people-less urban context. These are empty places waiting for something to happen and Smith is that something. The graphic nature of the environments in which Smith works, has the effect of isolating and separating her body and movement from their surrounds. They create a strong sense of foreground and background, creating a stage through which Smith moves. Even in her still images, her inferred movement is evident against the obviously empty, still graphic context. Foregrounding movement in this way supports its reading as line and therefore as drawing.

In her new work, Moving Freely, Smith is running. Using video footage and still imagery, she captures her movements through the lanes, car parks, and parklands of Naarm, Melbourne. The running is continuous, devoid of conclusion or commencement—it just persists. The movement of the camera approaches Smith from behind, runs adjacent to her, then passes by. Again, and again. The runner’s inability to keep up imparts a sense that no matter what she does, it will never be enough. She is always chasing and always left behind. The runner does not take time to be despondent, because she must keep pushing forward - an apt metaphor for motherhood. Smith's perpetual exertion mirrors an aspect of our contemporary condition—an existence held in an endless cycle, aptly described by contemporary theorist Boris Groys, as suspended or wasted time. [3]

[1] Tim Ingold, The life of lines, New York, Routledge, 2015, 118.
[2] http://www.tanialousmith.com/news/archives/01-2020 and http://www.tanialousmith.com/news/archives/01-2018
[3] Boris Groys, Comrades of Time, e-flux, #11, December 2009.

© Belinda Yee, February 2023

Room sheet

To view the room sheet and read the exhibition essay and curator’s notes, click on the image on the left.

In conversation with Tania Lou Smith

Listen to Tania Lou Smith in conversation with Ira Ferris on her Sympoiesis program on East Side Radio 89.7 on Monday 3 July.

Click on the image on the right to listen.