스킵네비게이션

Born 1985 in Copenhagen, Denmark

Lives in Copenhagen

Amalie SMITH, Clay Theory, 2019, Stereoscopic 3D film, active 3D glasses, 18min

Courtesy of the artist

Amalie SMITH was educated at The School of Writing and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and continues to work with creative writing and art alike. In SMITH’s practice, technology and research merge with art and visual aesthetics. She shows us how prehistory offers a portal that can help us understand not just our present, but our future too. The questions we ask ourselves about modern technology and our perception of life are not necessarily new, even if the technologies involved are. The terracotta sculptures exemplify the alluring and terrifying aspects of this issue because they are potentially either more or less alive than they first appear to be.

The 3D film Clay Theory is a meditation on the link between life and clay. The focal point of the film is a group of terracotta figurines: small human figures from the Cypriot Bronze Age, shaped out of reddish-brown fired clay. They can be seen on display at the Cyprus Museum, an archaeological museum in Nicosia, Cyprus. In the film, the terracotta figurines become the center of a speculative axis that dates all the way back to the origins of life on a barren planet and extends out into a post-human future where man-made life is a reality.