Sally Smart

Title:  The Artist’s Ballet Series

Artist Statement

My interest in avant-garde histories and legacies is well documented and continues in this new series of work The Artist’s Ballet (2020-2022) and has developed over a decade with The Violet Ballet (2018-19) and The Choreography of Cutting (2014-17). Beginning with The Choreography of Cutting series (2014-17) and ‘cutting’ directly referencing my collage practice – initially drawn from aligning drawing and cutting processes with comparisons to dance notations. 

In The Choreography of Cutting, I looked to dance history- Martha Graham, Pina Bausch, early 2oth Century Avant-Garde performance and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. With cutting still the focus, the work evolved with digital cutting of images of Ballets Russes dance costumes designed by early modernist artists Henri Matisse, Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikael Larinov. 

Inspired by learning the Ballets Russes costumes were often cut up for resizing and economy – to conceptually direct the digital remaking of selected costumes through a process of cutting -up images and elements into digital collages, that became the drawings for embroideries rendered two dimensionally, and eventually performed, attached to dancers’ bodies as costume.

This reimagined and embodied discourse between the historical and contemporary avant-gardes was foundational in conceiving The Violet Ballet installation and performance work, which premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2019. The Violet Ballet is an immersive iterative series of works—with detailed, assemblage compositions created in Australia and Indonesia, inspired by the sets and costumes referencing the Ballets Russes, alongside Indonesian wayang kulit theatre forms.

The Artists’ Ballet evolved through various iterations, beginning with a film work initially commissioned by the Bendigo Art Gallery – a two channel dance work filmed in 2019 with the dancers Deanne Butterworth and Jo Lloyd- the work was created in response to two Australian expatriate artists Bessie Davidson (my great aunt) and Margaret Preston and their decade long relationship during the early 20th century living in Paris. The dance performance embodies timeless themes and psychological tensions for these women, grappling with the avant-garde in art and life, at a traumatic period in human history (war, isolation, gender, and modernity). 

The dance performance creates a contemporary lived presence and connection to the art and lives of women artists in anytime. As a consequence of the 21st Century Covid pandemic this exhibition work opened and closed on the same day.

A modified iteration, titled The Artist’s Ballet was installed for The National at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney with a room-scale installation incorporating printed textiles, video projections with suspended sculptural elements (puppets) these articulated moving parts, representing dance. Along with my interest in 20th Century intersections of art and dance I looked to the influential German choreographer Pina Bausch and the dance performance Café Müller scenography – replacing Parisian café chairs with painter’s easels, to set the dance work. 

The moving image projections depict two women performing through the space of easels, which is projected onto the digitally printed curtains representing scenes from their dance – the curtain becomes the performance. The colour wheel is a visual reference –seen on the curtains, in the film projections and in the dancers' skirts as multi wedges of colour aligning with their own colour palettes.

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“Sally Smart works across artistic media, from collage and cut-outs to screen printing, objects, video, and sound. The act of cutting and reassembling is central to her works, which frequently employ fabric elements evoking the human body, the domestic and the feminine.

Imbued with a strong psychological dimension, they evoke an uneasy world in which fracturing and fragmentation are contrasted with repair and rearrangement – gestures violent and restorative in turn.”

Rachel Kent -Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, 2021.

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The Artist’s Ballet painting works from 2021-25 use multiple collage elements assembled to represent details of performing bodies composed into a single figure, with variously abstracted elements and configurations. In the collaged geometry are cut-out photographic elements, from my dance archive, images in black and white digitally printed on satin, inserted to construct or disrupt the image making, choreographed elements to make manifest the psychological tensions conveyed through the cut and fragmented body. The dynamics of my assemblage processes align with the dance choreographer and dance notations; the fragments of linear drawing conceptually point to the movements of making and assembling as performing to construct these works – the elements are choreographed into place.

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Dancetté (The Artist’s Dress), exhibition at Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne 28 June to 2 August 2025. For almost three decades, Sally Smart has been making work at the intersections of dance, movement, and pedagogy. With Dancetté (The Artist’s Dress), she continues her longstanding preoccupation with cutting, collage, and fabricating, turning her attention to the avant-garde histories and legacies of fashion and design. 

Smart’s practice embodies a long-held commitment to feminism and the desire to take risks and transcend boundaries; the monumental textile The Artist’s Ballet (Danser Brut), for example, considers both the performance of making and the making of performance, but purposely disrupts both modalities.

For Smart, the acts of pinning, cutting, and stitching have always been political; sewing here is not embedded in the discourses and desires of fashion, but in art – and specifically in its potential to rupture and realign. Likewise, transgressive female agency is evident throughout Dancetté: in the strident figures, the direct gazes, the collapse in meaning and representation of both marionettes and models, and in the not-so-gentle subversion of Smart’s own 2017 collaboration with Italian fashion house Marni. 

The ‘dress’ here is both personal and political. Smart’s is a practice that has continually foregrounded women as both authors and subjects, and Dancetté includes reference to the wild abstract practice of Sonia Delaunay as well as to Smart’s great aunt, the Impressionist Bessie Davidson. She often provides us with feminist touchstones that stretch across time and space; however, it is Smart’s own authorship and ownership that is particularly asserted in Dancetté (The Artist’s Dress).

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Contact 

Sally Dan-Cuthbert gallery@sallydancuthbert.com