Forum #24 - Dani Smith with Zoë Mendelson

26 Jul 2021

Dani Smith will present excerpts from a collection of d​iary entries detailing her time returning home to Los Banos, a small farming town in central California, for Christmas 2020. Writings that emerged from this time, observe the bending, breaking, and adjusting of her psyche as it reacts to the shape shifting home environment and growing pains of evolving family dynamics.

Dani Smith is a painter and writer in her first year of PhD research at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research project: So the Cursed May Conjure, is a spiritual exploration of selfhood that engages the mechanics of black feminism and autotheory to query a range of metaphysical trauma as withstanding effects of normalised violences against black female bodies. Converging intimate storytelling and multidisciplinary painting methods, Dani’s practice illustrates examples of modern black female misrepresentations, its various forms of consequences, and executions of resistance against prevailing ideologies.

Zoë Mendelson has an expanded field practice that owes its spatialisation, historical narratives and compositional framework to painting. She has exhibited and performed widely in the UK and abroad, including Fondation Cartier, Paris; CRAC Alsace, Chapter, Cardiff and Science Museum, London. Zoë’s research engages disorder as a culturally produced phenomenon, in parallel to its clinical counterpart. She has a PhD from Central St Martins and is Head of Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art. Zoë co-curates the network paintingresearch with Geraint Evans and is co-founder and editor of The Edit, an online inclusive, de-canonised bibliography for students in Fine Art and related fields, now used in Arts education internationally.