My work investigates what is seen and unseen, the fragile balance between rawness and beauty, and the ways presence can resist erasure. Through painting, mixed media, and textiles, I construct layered surfaces that function as both image and trace, suggesting the persistence of memory in the face of disappearance. Found objects and gestural marks often anchor the work, grounding abstraction in lived experience. I am drawn to the poetics of tension — fragility as strength, erasure as evidence — inviting viewers to consider how resilience and visibility manifest in both personal and collective histories.
About the Artist
Sieva Smith is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the tensions between erasure and presence, fragility and resilience, and the layered dialogues of memory and visibility. Working across painting, textiles, and installation, Smith creates evocative works that merge abstraction with narrative. She has exhibited across Maryland and the Mid-Atlantic region and is currently developing a major solo exhibition scheduled for 2026.Artist's Statement
My practice centers on building visual languages that engage themes of presence, erasure, fragility, rawness, beauty, and permanence. I approach each work as a layered conversation, where materials carry as much weight as subject matter. Oil, charcoal, and textile fragments often intermingle, creating surfaces that are both painterly and tactile. These materials speak to memory and history, grounding my exploration of erasure in tangible form. The series Hard Work and Dedication reflects this approach: textiles and found objects honor overlooked labor and collective effort, transformed into poetic installations that resist invisibility. Current work pushes further into abstraction, using color and gesture to explore the thresholds of visibility. Ultimately, I aim for my practice to act as both mirror and archive — an articulation of lived experience that acknowledges loss but insists on presence, carrying fragility into permanence.Featured Work
Photos
Featured Work: Photos
Crop Circles (from the Hardwork and Dedication series)
Mixed Media
2024
Installation view, Crop Circles (Hard Work and Dedication Series), Port of Leonardtown Winery- in Partnership with St. Mary's Art Council, Leonardtown, MD, 2024
Crop Circles (from the Hardwork and Dedication series) was a solo exhibition that explored cycles of presence, labor, and memory through abstracted marks and circular motifs. The circle became both a symbol of continuity and a trace of disappearance — a form that holds but also erases. Using layered surfaces and gestural abstraction, the works drew attention to fragility as a state of resilience, and to the ways beauty emerges through repetition and impermanence. The exhibition situated agricultural and cosmic references as metaphors for collective human experience: what is planted, what endures, and what risks being forgotten.
Hardwork and Dedication Panels 1-4
Mixed Media
2023
Installation view, Hard Work and Dedication, Howard County Economic Development Authority, Columbia, MD, 2023–2025.
Hard Work and Dedication is a mixed-media installation series that honors the unseen labor and resilience of everyday life. Using textiles, found materials, and gestural abstraction, the works evoke cycles of fragility, persistence, and beauty embedded in human effort. Circular motifs and textured surfaces serve as metaphors for both presence and erasure — the way contributions are imprinted on collective memory, yet often overlooked. Exhibited multiple times across Maryland from 2023 to 2025, the series transforms ordinary materials into poetic expressions of endurance, reminding viewers that even the most fragile traces can embody permanence.
Booking
I am available to travel with no restrictions.