Sable Elyse Smith

Sable Elyse Smith works in video, sculpture, photography, installation, neon and text, often drawing from her own life and experiences. Her work confronts systems of inequity, notably the US prison industrial complex and its structures of racial bias. By recontextualising and adapting ready-made objects and materials from prisons and bureaucratic spaces, she highlights the trauma affected on incarcerated individuals, their loved ones, and their communities. Works include re-articulated visiting room seating forming geometric sculptures, and a series of paintings whose imagery is derived from the pages of a children’s colouring book, such as the piece Coloring Book 42 (2019). The source material was intended to instruct young people on ways to interact with a court environment, complete with a female character called “Judge Friendly”. Smith’s practice asks us to take a better look at the power structures governing our lives and to rethink what freedom is: both where it exists and for whom.