SIEVA
SMITH
Interdisciplinary Artist | A Sensory, Cycle-Based Art Practice
SIEVA SMITH
THE PRACTICE
This art practice follows a cycle-based approach to becoming, examining how presence shifts through rawness, beauty, fragility, erasure, and permanence across environments, inner states, and memory.
ABOUT SIEVA SMITH
Sieva Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the continual transformation of existence. Grounded in a sensory way of seeing, she studies a universal cycle of presence, rawness, beauty, fragility, erasure, and permanence. Smith traces how it moves through people, environments, and memory. Her paintings draw from both real-world observation and internal experience, transforming light, air, plants, seeds, soil, and human presence into atmospheric states.
Smith works across portraiture, draped forms, landscape-inspired atmospheres, and material studies, using each subject as a way to test how cycles behave in different contexts. Her practice bridges the external world and internal emotional climates, revealing the thresholds where forms soften, dissolve, and return as something new.
She lives and works in Maryland and Richmond, continually expanding her research through travel, observation, and sensory engagement with the world around her.
ARTIST STATEMENT
"My work explores how existence continually transforms. I study a universal cycle comprising presence, rawness, beauty, fragility, erasure, and permanence, and how this cycle unfolds in both our inner and outer worlds. I notice it in people, landscapes, weather, memory, and the quiet details of everyday life. Everything I observe becomes part of the work.
My process is deeply sensory. Environment and human presence form the vocabulary I absorb from lived experience. Even the imagined spaces in my paintings originate from real sensory impressions that shift and change as they evolve through the cycle. Nothing is invented; everything is transformed.
I believe time is a rule, but the cycle is the law. Each painting holds a state within itself, a moment where a form is emerging, dissolving, or returning. Fragility and erasure are thresholds rather than endings. What remains after transformation becomes its permanence, and ultimately, the beginning of the next becoming.
Across figures, seeds, draped forms, and atmospheric fields, the cycle is always the true subject. My paintings are not depictions of life as it looks, but translations of how it behaves, which I believe to be continually and all at once."
CONTACT
For inquiries about projects, residencies, collaborations, or acquisitions, please reach out: art@sievasmith.com