I am wild, I blow with the wind.

I shriek too with their nightly cries.

My roots are embedded, tangled and toiled.

I share this skin, this body, this Earth incarnation.

(2021, journal excerpt)

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Grounded in esoteric and meditation practice, Katrina engages methods for making that traverses moments of chance and uncertainty as ways of co-creatively making with language, image, sound and performance.  Here, a process of making becomes a flowing dance or a fleeting song, a performance or performative act, as part of a collaboration of energies, of experimental, intuitive and expansive moments of play.  Such an approach resonates more-than-representational methodologies, navigating alternative ways of positioning themselves within systems of oppression.

 

Cultural narratives that we have been fed and that we continue to feed ourselves hold agency. 

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Katrina Sheena Smyth is a practicing artist-researcher, with a BA (honours) and MFA (distinction) in Fine Art, currently completing a Ph.D. at Belfast School of Art with Ulster University (2017-2022).  Based in Flax Art Studios, they are a coordinating member of Ulster Research Salon; Art Research Matters (research/reading group), a co-founding editor (2019) of Intersections, UU Postgraduate Research Journal, and a member of performance art collective Bbeyond. 

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We come together, early morning bird-songs, the wild tabby cat meows,

the air is sweet, flows through me and I feel the warmth of my body.

I begin to follow the line of bodies slowly, singularly together.

Small steps, careful steps, pebbles shift as I meet them,

the vibrancy of greens as daylight breaks through.

The gushing flows of streaming water,

trickling past

with each step

following one another

supporting one another,

becoming with one another,

we too flow in other directions

stepping, cracking, blowing, trickling, singing

as part of this expansive new day,

bird-songs, meows, and morning light

(2020, journal excerpt)

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