NAN SMITH

SCULPTURE – INSTALLATION – PHOTOGRAPHY

Nan Smith creates narrative sculpture exploring human consciousness, memory, and environmental concerns through artwork that integrates ceramic figures and photomontage.

Nan Smith Sculptor
Nan smith Sculpture and installation

AMERICAN SCULPTOR

Nan Smith Sculptor is a full-time studio artist based in Gainesville, Florida. A Professor Emerita at the University of Florida’s School of Art + Art History, she continues to present workshops and demonstrations in figurative sculpture and mold-making. Her work has been widely published and exhibited internationally.

MERCURY

Nan Smith Sculptor installation

ART & SCIENCE

The Mercury installation informs the public about environmental impacts to seafood and the need for conserving our oceans and seas. The Research | Mercury Art + Science is intended as a resource about environmental mercury. Learn more about the development of the installation and the research that was conducted to support the art work on our Studio Research page.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Nan smith Sculptor in her studio in Florida
Nan Smith Sculptor in her studio.

NAN SMITH SCULPTOR


Nan Smith is a sculptor whose research-based practice spans immersive installation, ceramic sculpture, and photographic imagery. Working in fired clay — a material she discovered could do anything — she builds environments that explore ecological vulnerability, cultural memory, and the inner life.

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Projects


Three themes run through the work: what we owe the environment, what we carry from cultural heritage, and what lives in us beyond what we can see — explored here through sculpture, installation, and image.

  • ECOLOGY – WATER CODE BLUE


    The work asks how we care for water — and what we pass on to those who come after.
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  • ECOLOGY – MERCURY


    An immersive installation tracing environmental damage to seafood and its ecological and human impacts.
    DISCOVER

  • CULTURE – TWENTY TWELVE


    A heroic figure carries the weight of inherited history and the duty placed on the young.
    DISCOVER

  • CONSCIOUSNESS – FAITH


    Across a mirrored divide, three “spirit forms” hold what can’t be seen: faith and belief in one another.
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  • CONSCIOUSNESS – VISIONARY


    A spirit figure crosses a mirrored threshold, sailing from what she was toward what she is becoming.
    DISCOVER

  • COMPLEX ENSEMBLES

    “Invoking the kind of aggressively symbolic program that one associates with 16th century fresco cycles and complex ensembles of allegorical statuary, Nan Smith’s Mercury seizes space and conjures within it a monumental disquisition in which every surface and form participates with ringing clarity.”
    GLEN R BROWN, PHD
    Professor of Art History, Kansas State University – Ceramics: Art and Perception Magazine

Sculpture at the intersection of consciousness, culture and ecology.