Smashing Silence

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, 2 Marsham Street

In Smashing Silence an ice capped mountain range is visible in the distance, while a sudden violent explosion of colour, with what appear to be shards of the mountain itself, smashes through a domestic window. There is a stark contrast between what we can see of the room’s interior (its window and curtain rail, much like those in many homes in Britain), and the unreal rendering of the mountain viewed from it. Through her composition, colours and imagery, Smart conveys the feelings of seclusion she experienced when, in 2019, she returned for six months to the village where she was raised. Smart works with the visual language of comic books. Through this form, she abstracts sensual experiences, particularly those of sound and texture, or emotions - which she represents visually, to convey a sense of how they feel. She brings to the genre a longstanding interest in music, and her fluid imagery and approachable visual language appeal to a wide cross-section of people. Smart replaces different elements of a story with shapes, colours and textures, presenting her viewers with particular felt moments that, considered collectively, point to a narrative. She is interested in her work being engaged with in an instinctive rather than cerebral way, her images often provoking an emotional reaction – a trigger for her viewers to generate a narrative that resonates with their own experiences. The comic book genre is a growing movement in the contemporary art landscape of Britain today.

Miranda Smart was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire and grew up in the village of Wollaston. She studied Illustration at London College of Communication, where she wrote her thesis on the visual representation of music, graduating in 2017. She has exhibited her work in small galleries and art spaces in Northampton, London and Porto - where she spent a year living and working on her first self-published Audio-Visual Abstract Comic ‘Briz de Mar’. Her comics have been published in a number of anthologies and journals including Heavy Metal, Komikaze and Huck magazine, she was also named one of Broken Frontiers’ ‘Six to watch’ for 2020. Smart has worked on a range of collaborative projects with musicians and other designers and after an Arts Council grant in 2022 has been experimenting further with audio-visual comics and on projects with musicians Meddle, Brooklyn Ford and Megalashhh from her home in South London.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Miranda Smart (1995 - )

Title

Smashing Silence

Date

2019

Medium

Print - Inkjet print - created originally with scanned hand drawn inks and digitally coloured

Dimensions

height: 23 cm; width: 23 cm

Provenance

Purchased from the artist, December 2022, through the Art XUK project 2022-23

GAC number

19132