Vicky Smith is an artist film maker and academic who has worked in experimental animation and 16mm film for 30 years and has screened work internationally in galleries and at festivals.
Vicky was part of the London Film Makers Co-op, has a PhD in experimental film, is co-founder of artist collective Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF) in Bristol and lectures at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.
Vicky is available for workshops, talks, screenings, and collaborations.
Contact: vsmith9@ucreative.ac.uk
Peer Reviews….
“In Vicky Smith’s most abstract works to date, the body feels very present, as it does so often in her filmmaking. Her techniques for direct mark-making on the film’s surface are astonishing. Tiny white marks fiercely scratched into the black of the raw film-stock, pinpricks, tears and scratches becoming abrasions and bruises suggest physical vulnerability. Things dribbled onto the filmstrip, things scratched into it – the filmstrip, too, is paramount in Vicky’s films.” – David Curtis
“Having watched you make work live such as, Agitations, for Analogue Ensembles’[i] programme for Whitstable Biennale, performed Bicycle Tyre Track and project Noisy Licking, Dribbling & Spitting I’ve observed your whole body is invested in each step of your process, from making, performing and showing. You may preserve the language of cinema; the frame as unit of cinema, universal projection speeds, the close up and notions of genre as noted in your use of ‘the weepie’ but that’s where the alliance ends. Instead we’re treated to loud, sensitive, aesthetic explosions of raw physical manifestations of emotion, feeling and action but without any of the drama.” – Cathy Rogers
“Smith uses bodily fluids such as spit and tears as the material basis for the film’s imagery, interspersed with animated scratches on the surface of the celluloid. 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. The choice of material support – clear leader rather than negative stock – bestows on the film an ethereal quality that elicits both fascination and discomfort.” – Blood, sweat, and tears: Bodily inscriptions in contemporary experimental film by Kim Knowles (2013)
Review of The Crafty Animator and Birgitta’s article ‘Made by Hand’ with image from Noisy Licking, Dribbling and Spitting – Caroline Ruddell and Paul Ward (eds.). The Crafty Animator: Handmade, Craft-Based Animation and Cultural Value
The “emphasis on texture and viscerality …suggests the filmmaker’s physical engagement with the material body of the film” Maud Jacquin (2018) From Reel to Real – an epilogue: Feminist politics and materiality at the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative.
Vicky Smith 