While the collective isolation and ensuing mania from the reality of the past nine months has gotten to almost everyone’s mental health—artist [Elizabeth Paige Smith](https://www.elizabethpaigesmithart.com/about) is mostly unfazed. She has seized the chaos of quarantine as an opportunity to take a “deep dive into communications,” viewing social media as an advantageous tool for creative possibility. Smith is a renowned furniture designer and artist with a coveted studio on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, collectors of her high-end tables and vortex commodes amongst the likes of celebrities Gwyneth Paltrow, Kanye West, Kirstin Dunst, and Patricia Arquette. Her unique sensitization to textures, the environment, light, and overall ability to break free from the pressurized conformity of contemporary art have earned her exhibition spots in the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, amongst many others. Smith was impressively featured in the first “Made in California” exhibition at LACMA, along with Sam Maloff and Frank Gehry. FLAUNT had the opportunity to sit down with Smith over Zoom to discuss her search for creative opportunity amidst quarantine, artistic values, and future projects.
Prior to the origins of the pandemic, Smith relays that she had detailed plans for studio visits that collapsed, which she exclaims set her “spiraling back into the emotional headscape I was in before living in isolation.” Smith had an atypical and unparalleled experience that inadvertently prepared her for the pandemic — living for ten years in isolation at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation house in Woodside, just outside of tech-buzzing metropolis Palo Alto. During her time away, Smith found inspiration in the midst of her rekindled connection with nature, creating a series of eight stone sculptures titled “Naked and Fucking Free.” “I’ve always found nature as a source of inspiration,” she explains. “I’ve always contrasted my own feelings and thoughts with nature, and the consistency of nature.” Her inspiration for the eight figurines stemmed from her steady fascination with organic matter and geometric figures, crafting sculptures that portray female figures in their sense of emotional independence, but accompanying vulnerability. Smith describes them as representing an “emboldened feminine state,” describing how she purposefully utilized denotatively masculine materials like stone to contrast the conventional thinking of what it means to be feminine.
Smith’s work can easily be described as feminist—a facet she says she was surprised to realize until her friend pointedly referred to her work as such. She stands behind the assumption, being influenced by a long lineage of strong women in her family who worked within various artistic mediums. She claimed the artistic space of design with utter reverence, soon discovering neither design nor art was an easy territory to traipse into. Despite being fortunate enough to capture the rapid attention of acclaimed publications like the _New York Times_ and being invited to exhibit in Milan and Japan with elite design groups, she noticed the male-dominated nature of the industry. “At the time design was male-dominated, run by a group of guys in New York, and no women in America were participating in global exhibitions,” she remarks. “I felt very isolated and unsupported, aside from a few key people.”
However, this did not stop Smith’s ambitions, as she elucidates that not giving up is “a part of the creative war.” Smith continued to shift gears, looking for opportunity wherever she could find it, redefining artistic expression in her examination of raw emotion in her art. This rawness is on display in her series of woven warm-colored tapestries, named “[A Very Long Day](https://www.elizabethpaigesmithart.com/a-very-long-day-studio-visit),” which takes an intimate glimpse into the sensory overload of challenges faced in cherished relationships. “There’s a lot of gravity in that experience,” she shares. “There can be a lot of inner turmoil, and there’s a spectrum we experience, which I focused on a lot in this work.”
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Smith’s potent ability to delineate emotionality within physical raw material is an aspect that originated from her inclinations as a child, making creations with mud in the Cayman Islands, where she grew up. Here, Smith expresses that she sought isolation as a form of comfort, spending most of her time underwater, hyper-aware of details, equilibrium, and weightlessness within her domain. “I feel invincible with equilibrium,” she reflects. “All of your senses are nurtured underwater, so it heightens your awareness. Feeling invincible is having your own forcefield. There was a time when challenges around me were out of my control. I was taxed by others’ chaos, and I developed this concept around my forcefield, where I could create my own equilibrium.”
In her exile from the outside world, Smith says she has developed the “chance to pay attention to subtlety,” something she encourages of other artists around her. In terms of her future pursuits, Smith sees herself “opening up to a more conceptual realm,” already starting to traverse the juxtaposition of human voice and natural sound in her collection of sound poems titled “Waiting For You,” set in a pristine California poppy field. While what work we see from Smith next may be a surprise, it’s clear her multidisciplinary accolades are only beginning, apparent in her unwavering confidence within the exploration of different media, adaptable to any challenge that dares to come her way.
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