CLARE SMITH  passed on the evening of Saturday December 10th 2022.

She lived and worked in Dover. In 2006 she co-founded Dover Arts Development with Joanna Jones and they were co-directors until her death.

Her mixed English/Chinese heritage informed her perspective on issues of identity and categorisation. Frequent travelling as a child and young adult meant she had a somewhat ambivalent relationship to place, reinforced by the sense of ambiguity that came from her mixed identity. She worked with drawing, print media, collage and moving image to investigate this ambivalence and what it feels like to actually be in a place, with references to craft, the importance of labour and the handmade. Through her choice of materials and approaches, she created work which attempts to create a sense of unity, an interpretation of Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space” – seen as a space in which different parts can come together to challenge dominant ideas of wholeness.

Smith founded a shared studio space for 7 artists called the Dover Studio Collective.

She was shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2019 and included in the Drawing Room’s Drawing Biennial 2021.

The sequence of 70 Chemo-Day drawings, made while undergoing treatment in the last 3 years of her life, are a sustained and defiant act of creativity. 40 were acquired by the Welcome Trust.

The work lives on.