Artist Statement

An interest in poetry and early work in 16mm animation compels Danielle Smith-Llera to consider how written words and drawn lines are kinetic. Her work focuses on how motion transforms dynamically. Ultimately, her words ask how line can describe a moment. To answer these questions, she makes and cuts apart drawings, relief prints, transfer prints, monotypes and paper sculptures, and collages them into a new order through a process that mimics that of writing and rewriting. Like a poem revolving around the spirit of a moment, these new lines tell a visual narrative by exploring snatches of captured motion. Her spare monochromatic palette also relates to the literary world, and to the infinitely elastic medium of black printed words on a white page. Long panels, suggesting film strips or unfolding books, seek to tell a visual narrative by exploring snatches of captured motion. Smith-Llera's work focuses specifically on the act of leaping, where a body struggles upward, travelling weightless for a sublime moment before crashing to the ground. These works narrate this upward act as a passage from one state to another, bearing witness to the transformation.