Vicky Smith is an artist filmmaker and academic who has worked with 16mm experimental film and animation for over 30 years. Vicky employs experimental animation and performance to explore bodily relations within a broader ecology of fragility and tenacity.
Recent screenings, performances, and commissions include: Be Water My Friend: An Animation Intervention at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco (2025); Transgressions at the Tricky Women Animation Festival, Vienna (2025); Tenacity at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan (2025); and Imagery: Screening of Contemporary Experimental Film & Documentary, Seoul (2025).
Previous key exhibitions and screenings include: We Shine, Portsmouth; Light Cone: 40 Years, Paris; Splash, Scratch, Dunk! at the Barbican Cinema, London (2021); A Picture of Health at Arnolfini, Bristol (2021); From Reel to Real at Tate Modern and Anthology Film Archives, New York (2016); Assembly at Tate Britain (2014); and Channel 4 TV (1990).
Her work is discussed in several publications, including: B. Hosea’s The Crafty Animator (2019), K. Knowles’ Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices (2020), and Tess Takahashi’s “Disarticulating Authorship: Vicky Smith’s Direct Animations” in The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Film (2024).
Smith’s own writing has been published in Millennium Film Journal (2024) and Animation Studies 2.0 (2024; 2021). She was awarded the McLaren–Lambart Award for Best Scholarly Book in Animation for the co-edited volume Experimental & Expanded Animation: New Perspectives and Practices (2018).
Her practice-led PhD examined relationships between the body, technology, and materials in experimental film through the lens of modernist theory. She currently teaches in the School of Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.
Smith was a member of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op and co-founded Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF), a film and sound collective supporting experimental practice in Bristol since 2015, providing an independent platform and vital resource for artists’ production, distribution, and critical engagement, with a particular focus on experimental and analogue practices.
CONTACT: vickycbsmith@gmail.com
Featured publications, essays & articles:
“Many of Smith’s films start with embodied performances, which expose not only her physical labour and means of production, but also the specificity and vulnerability of her body and materials. She invites us to consider the uneasy imbrication of authorship, embodiment, and analogue film as anchors of meaning at the present historical moment.”
— Tess Takahashi (2024), The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Film
“With every re-exposure, she re-activates the film surface, across movement and time, and expands the possibilities of collapsing space, bodies and temporalities onto one single surface.” – Maria Anastassiou (2024), On Vicky Smith’s Shedding (2024), From PhD chapter: Methodologies: Volatile Temporal Stacks: multiple exposure on 16mm analogue film
“we’re treated to loud, sensitive, aesthetic explosions of raw physical manifestations of emotion, feeling and action” Cathy Rogers (2021), – Conversations about Cinema
“The mouth alone is used as a tool, as she licks, spits and dribbles paint directly onto the filmstrip. This technique gives her an intimate and unpredictable relationship with the resulting marks.” – B. Hosea (2019), The Crafty Animator
“In Vicky Smith’s most abstract works to date, the body feels very present, as it does so often in her filmmaking” — David Curtis (2019), Grainy Realism
“Smith invites an almost clinical engagement with these internal fluids. Enlarged on the screen, they resemble scientific microscopic images that bring us into an uncanny physical proximity with the artist’s body.” – Kim Knowles (2013), Blood, sweat, and tears: Bodily inscriptions in contemporary experimental film
“A film of multiple layers, investigating the idea of skin and the effects of time and light upon it. Not only human skin, but also the ‘film skin’ itself – the celluloid strip of images. Filmmaker Vicky Smith talks to her mother Ann, films the pores of her body in extreme close-up, and compares these images to the beach photographs of yesteryear. Skin ages, burns and flakes: how to cope with these erosive but inevitable processes?” – Adrian Martin
Vicky Smith 