Your Heart to a Dog to tear

Cheri Smith (b.1991, Essex), lives and works in London

Cheri’s practice is a personal attempt to access and understand nature, through drawings made with pencil and pastel, and paintings in oil, egg and glue. At the core of this is an investigation into the relationship between looking and knowing, and the history of how humans have looked at the natural world.  She is drawn to the tangled, interconnected, mysterious and ultimately unknowable; it is this nature of things which her works aim to illuminate.

Recent works explore themes of wildness, animality, embodiment and strangeness. Cats yowl, frogs jump, girls creep and squat. Her images emerge through material, observational and imaginative means and they exist somewhere between portrait, still life and landscape. They possess detailed textures, sinuous line,  sprawling patterns and an intense clarity of focus.

@chchcheri
www.cherismith.co.uk

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2022. It is Better to be Cats than be Loved, Tabula Rasa Gallery
2022. Bookworks, James Freeman Gallery
2022. The Amber Room, Reference Point library
2022. Charta, Fortnight Institute, online salon
2022. I’ll be Your Mirror, Alice’s Oyster Bar & Gallery, Boisdale of Bishopsgate
2021. Nine Lives, Fortnight Institute, New York
2021. Sunday Times Watercolour Competition, Willis Museum & Sainsbury Gallery
2020. Winter Solstice Art, Books & Ephemera, Fortnight Institute
2020. Life on Venus, The Tub, Hackney
2020. With Love, Paint Talk
2020. The Amber Room, curated by Rosie Reed and Tara Guiness, London
2019. Saturnalia, 124 Columbia Road, London
2019. A High Hang, Eccleston Project Space, London
2019. We Can Only Have Fun on Certain Days, Warbling Collective
2019. The Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize, the Mall Galleries, London
2018. The Best of the Drawing Year 2018 - Christie’s
2018. Open Studios - SPACE, London

RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS

2022. Artist Residency at Dumfries House, Scotland
2020. Sunday Times Watercolour Competition - finalist
2020. Moritz/Heyman Residency, Volterra, Italy
2019. Artist Residency at Hanover Grange, Jamaica
2019. Lynn Painter Stainers Prize - finalist
2018. Trustees Prize, Royal Drawing School
2012/13. Jennifer Davey Memorial Award for Fine Art 2012/13

COLLECTIONS 

UK Royal Collection, Sir Moritz-Heyman Collection, Private Collections


This exhibition will donate a 10% of its sales to All Dogs Matter.

“ All Dogs Matter is a dog rescue and rehoming charity working in and around London to transform the lives of unwanted and abandoned dogs. We also rehome dogs in need from overseas.
In 2021 All Dogs Matter rescued and rehomed 330 dogs with new owners. We also found forever homes for 48 unwanted and abandoned dogs from China, Egypt and Italy.”