Yasmin Smith: Ntaria Fence

In early 2014, Yasmin Smith spent several weeks living in Ntaria about 130km west of AliceSprings assisting the community of potters there on the Old Church Project. The elemental life-cycle and deep materiality of the desert stuck with her. (Iron-rich earth sucked up by trees that live and die and are put back in the earth, like us, as ash and bones.) Typical of Smith's somewhat archeological approach to ceramics, she has worked for eighteen months on an ambitious, highly process-driven installation that has come from her time in Ntaria. In the lead up to the exhibition, she returned several times. Like the cycles of the landscape she found there, Ntaria Fence has an in-built circularity, its materials self-defining and self-referential.