HELD: Laura Smith

HELD | LAURA SMITH

13th February – 1st March 2025

'Still life allows me the greatest freedom to express my emotions. The placement, manipulation and gesture of the objects, as well as how they interact with one another, is a big driving force for me.’

In Laura Smith’s exquisite still life paintings, arrangements of objects are imbued with an anthropomorphic quality, holding space within each canvas.

Perishable items, such as fruit and fresh fish, are painstakingly arranged in what seems at first like a classic still life set up. Placed like shimmering props on a stage, they nestle next to pots, jars, vases and shells. The beauty and decay of the natural world is represented by the fragility of the living things portrayed here: apples may take weeks to rot, fish need to be thrown away at the end of the painting day.

But on a closer look there is also something more abstract at play. The artist experiments with scale and repetition. The still life set up might start out in the traditional way, with the inanimate subjects arranged on a plinth or table, but components are then added or taken away and items appear duplicated and reimagined; not strictly drawn from life. Here is a peach the size of the one in Roald Dahl’s fable (Mutual We Glow, 2023). In Both Full, 2023, a full glass is placed in front of a full bottle, giving the composition a surreal edge, ‘the extraordinary in the ordinary’.

Gravity preoccupies Smith. Her luminous pictures portray hanging ribbons, hovering swathes of fabric, floating feathers suspended or levitating in the deep blue abyss. Flowers appear in series, filling the canvas, leaning towards each other as if in conversation (Scene, 2024). Balloons appear in one work called Nobody Can Be Uncheered With A Balloon. Edible foodstuffs hold their own shape depending on their content … a jelly is helped by its mould, while a mound of salt creates its own ‘angle of repose’. See the delightfully named Gossiping Plums, 2023 and Salt Cellar Story, 2024.

The artist has spoken about how the theatre is an influence on her work... much like plotting out stage positions, she takes on the role of director, measuring the space between objects while determining how they relate to each other.

‘I love the word theatrical used in relation to my painting. To me, a theatre is somewhere that transports the audience to a semi-fantastical world where the props are transformed into real, magical objects. For example, a simple hoop might become a portal, or a chair a carriage. In my paintings, I aim to elevate the ordinary things around us and imbue them with significance.'

When we talk about ‘holding space’ for ourselves and others, we tend to mean a quiet pause, boundaries, and moments of self-awareness. There is an emotional intimacy in Smith's work that reflects this. In her series of iridescent paintings, these thoughtful human qualities are applied by the artist to inanimate objects. As the British painter Christopher Wood wrote in 1922, ‘I have thought a good deal about still life and I think it is a means of expressing one’s thoughts in a delicate manner which everyone else can’t quite understand.’

1 Laura Smith, artist statement, 2024.

2 Laura Smith, artist statement, 2024.

3 Christopher Wood, in a letter from May 1922 quoted in Simon Martin’s Foreword to The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain, Pallant House Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2024.

© Alice Chasey 2025 

Alice Chasey is a writer and editor specialising in contemporary art