Patricia Smith: “Psychemapper”
Patricia Smith is an American artist who currently lives and works between Rotterdam, The Netherlands and France’s Loire Valley. She spent much of her career in New York City. True to her description as an artist who researches mapping, her experiences of many different places in the world are the source of her inspiration.
Patricia’s work expands the function of mapping to focus on the psychic and psychological, pointing out mapping’s ultimate subjectivity. Her work is firmly based in a sense of place, yet the forms of her maps are not accurate—they reflect the distortions that arise in the mind when recalling an actual place. They tell part of a story in which the viewer can also find him/herself.
Incidents
Her maps on paper are made with layers of delicate ink dots and watercolor washes. She also uses collage and rubber stamps that she designs herself. Text plays a major role, giving clues to a larger narrative that remains mysterious and just out of reach. In her Incidents series, the maps illustrate a particular event that may be actual or fictional, one is not certain.
The drawn map is of a real place, but it is distorted by the mapper’s ongoing struggle between emotion and logic and the attempt to fix or stabilize what is constantly changing or fading from memory.
2014
2012
Dreamscapes
Other projects include installations that stretch the conceptual bounds of mapping. She has presented projects that mapped the dreamscape of a small village in northern Italy (Sognando Bienno) and the weight of a historical legend on the dreams of the residents of a town in Belgium (Dromen Ninove).
Energy Maps
For Embedded at Beaurepaire, her recent solo exhibition in Loudun, France (presented online at Front Room Gallery during the pandemic), Smith created Energy Maps that directly interacted with the surrounding landscape.
Paris Office
Bureau de la Géographie Intérieure is an ongoing conceptual project that occasionally takes a physical form. In 2017 it appeared as a temporary “office” in central Paris whose function was to map the place it was located in, including Smith’s interactions with those who visited.
For Patricia Smith, mapping is a connection to the psychic space that we all share, no matter where we are on the planet.
Patricia Smith began exhibiting in New York in the mid-1980s, and since then has established an extensive list of international solo and group exhibitions, curatorial projects and participation in international art fairs. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, L Magazine and many other national and international publications. She has received numerous awards including a New York Foundation for the Arts grant and residency awards at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and Kaus Australis in Rotterdam.
Featured Image: Upper Brooklyn Recovered Memory Tureen by Patricia Smith
Special thanks to the artist for her collaboration in this project
