TWO DIMENSIONS
My practice began in two dimensions – drawing, painting, the figured world rendered on a flat surface. A single ceramics course changed everything. I discovered in clay a material that could do anything: hold a two-dimensional image, become a three-dimensional form, carry photography on its surface, and expand into immersive installation environments that a viewer could walk inside and inhabit. More than that, I realized that the human body itself is a vessel – and that the figure, made in clay, could carry every story I needed to tell.
I work intuitively and rigorously in equal measure. A new direction begins as an image, a fragment of a sculpture seen in the mind before a single mark is made. That image becomes the starting point for a research process that draws from environmental science, cultural history, medical knowledge, and systems of belief. I travel to speak with scientists, reach out to colleagues, bring models into the studio and direct their gesture, document through photography, and study art historical precedents. All the while the work grows – intuitively, organically, the research deepening what intuition already knew.
My practice has moved through three interconnected areas of inquiry – inner consciousness and spirituality, the female experience and personal memory, and ecological and environmental health. For the first decade I was drawn to contemplative works that offered interior space in a culture I felt was losing its connection to spiritual life. I then turned toward the female experience – feminine nostalgia, the invisible labor of women, the transmission of memory across generations.
THE NATURAL WORLD
Most recently I have directed my attention outward toward the natural world – water systems, mercury contamination, industrial farming, ecological vulnerability – moved by a deep conviction that art has a responsibility to speak about the health of the planet and the people who depend on it. Underlying all of this is my cultural heritage, the foundation of my worldview, the ethical and spiritual ground from which everything I make emerges. When that heritage has called for direct expression, I have answered, in response to moments that demanded reflection.
These three threads – consciousness, culture, and ecology – are not separate. They are the same question asked three different ways: how do we take care of what sustains us?
Visual beauty is my hook. I want the work to stop people, to draw them close with its material presence, its scale, its luminosity, and then to hold them there long enough for something to land. I hope that something is different for every viewer. An emotion, a question, a memory, an awareness they did not have before they walked in. If they leave thinking about it, if they go home and do their own research, or look at the world a little differently, then the work has done what I always hoped a quiet voice could do.
meet the ARTIST
NAN SMITH BIOGRAPHY
American sculptor Nan Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned a BFA in ceramics, summa cum laude, from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, where she studied under porcelain master Rudolph Staffel — a Zen Buddhist painter turned ceramist whose abstract expressionist approach to clay taught her not what to make, but how to think. She later completed an MFA at The Ohio State University.
Early in her career Smith studied Japanese tea ceremony, Zen aesthetics, and ikebana under master Shozo Sato at the Japan House, University of Illinois — a formative influence that permanently shaped her approach to space, object, and contemplative experience.
Smith is Professor Emerita at the University of Florida, where she taught ceramics in the nationally recognized program from 1979 to 2019. Her work has been exhibited at SOFA Chicago, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, the Harn Museum of Art, and numerous venues throughout the United States.
Her honors include an NEA-funded Southern Arts Federation Fellowship in Sculpture, four State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Awards, and a University of Florida Research Foundation Professorship. Smith’s work has been featured in The Figure in Clay, World Famous Ceramic Artists’ Studios, and Florida Sculptors and Their Work, 1880–2020, as well as in Sculpture, Ceramics Monthly, Ceramics: Art and Perception, New Ceramics (Germany), Ceramics: Ireland, World Sculpture News, and China Ceramic Artist.
Her work is held in public and corporate collections including the World Ceramics Exposition Korea International Collection (Icheon, Korea), the Givat Haviva Art Center (Israel), American Express Corporation, the Lamar Dodd Art Center, Burlington County Community College, the Santa Fe College Foundation, and Rosenfield Collections. In 2013, Smith served as Editorial Juror for Lark and Sterling Publishing’s 500 Figures in Clay. An active educator, she has presented workshops and lectures nationally and internationally on figurative sculpture, mold-making, and photo-imaging techniques, with highlights including the Ceramics Ireland International Festival (2018), Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (2018), Penland School of Crafts (2017), and Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (2017).
She lives and works in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband, Paul Grant, on ten acres of upland and wetland that she walks daily with her Dalmatian, Liam — land whose seasonal rhythms, wildlife, and water systems remain a constant source of environmental awareness and artistic inquiry.
YOU MAY FIND ME
in the press
My work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, Ceramics: Art and Perception, New Ceramics (Germany), Ceramics Ireland, World Sculpture News, China Ceramic Artist, and on the cover of Ceramics Monthly – along with a chapter in 500 Figures in Clay (Lark Books). You can see these and all publications I’ve been featured in by clicking the link below.
