Yasmin Smith: Drowned River Valley, 2016-2018

"Yasmin Smith’s Drowned River Valley offers us a complex experience of the poetics and categorisation of the physical world. The title doubles as a poetic device pointing to the sense of immersion in place that the work evokes and is also a geographic descriptor to explain the formation of a ria – a coastal outlet – where the ocean partially drowns a river valley; in this case, the Parramatta River Valley. This opens us to the scientific, lyrical, cognitive and gestural composition of place. Through her ceramic focussed investigations into the materialities of place, the emphasis on the visibility of...