Lydia Smith’s interdisciplinary, research-based practice examines the remnants of the past and their links to our cultural understanding of time and place. Her work employs expanded forms of drawing and photography to respond to sites with histories of decay or haunting: family image archives, locked briefcases, pressed flowers, ruins, and ancient landscapes. She imagines these subjects as ghostly bodies, seeking their hidden narratives and meditating on inheritance. Her ongoing project, Burial Sites, investigates cemeteries to witness what is marked, what is lost, and what lingers in the aftermath of death.
Smith received an MFA from The Ohio State University and a BA from Rice University. She was awarded a Watson Fellowship in 2015 and an Ohio State Global Arts + Humanities Fellowship in 2022, as well as multiple grants from the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Residencies at Stove Works, the Vermont Studio Center, the Visual Studies Workshop, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and the Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen in Dresden, Germany have supported her work.
Exhibitions include The Neon Heater, OH; Good Children Gallery, LA; Ortega y Gasset Projects, NY; Icebox Project Space, PA; stop-gap projects, MO; Roy G Biv, OH; and Urban Arts Space, OH. She has completed public projects at The Ohio State Libraries, Olde Towne East Arts in Columbus, OH, and the City of the Dead in Cairo, Egypt. She has also shared her multidisciplinary project, Burial Sites, through public readings and conversations at Two Dollar Radio Headquarters, Ulises, and BasketShop Gallery. She was a member of the artist-run curatorial collective AUTOMAT in Philadelphia, PA (2018-2023), where she organized multiple exhibitions and community projects. Smith has previously taught as a lecturer in the Department of Art and the Center for Folklore Studies at Ohio State University. She is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor of Drawing at Wake Forest University.