Sally Smart: Dancetté (The Artist’s Dress)

Sally Smart Dancetté (The Artist’s Dress), a solo exhibition by renowned artist Sally Smart, continues Smart’s interest in female representation, enacted through various methodologies that include cutting and collage, using textiles in large-scale installations, as well as performance, film, sculpture and painting.

For almost three decades, Smart has been making work at the intersections of dance, movement and pedagogy. With Dancetté, she continues her longstanding preoccupation with cutting, collage and fabricating, turning her attention to the avant garde histories and legacies of fashion and design. Smart’s practice embodies a long-held commitment to feminism and the desire to take risks and transcend boundaries; the monumental textile The Artist’s Ballet (Danser Brut), for example, considers both the performance of making and the making of performance, but purposely disrupts both modalities.

For Smart, the acts of pinning, cutting and stitching have always been political; sewing here is not embedded in the discourses and desires of fashion, but in art – and specifically in its potential to rupture and realign. Likewise, transgressive female agency is evident throughout Dancetté: in the strident figures, the direct gazes, the collapse in meaning and representation of both marionettes and models, and in the not-so-gentle subversion of Smart’s own 2017 collaboration with Italian fashion house Marni. The ‘dress’ here is both personal and political.

Smart’s is a practice that has continually foregrounded women as both authors and subjects, and Dancetté includes reference to the wild abstract practice of Sonia Delaunay as well as to Smart’s great aunt, the impressionist Bessie Davidson. She often provides us with feminist touchstones that stretch across time and space, however it is Smart’s own authorship and ownership that is particularly asserted in Dancetté (The Artist’s Dress).