Jennifer Tarry Smith

Jennifer Tarry-Smith is a Melbourne-Naarm based artist working in the mediums of printmaking and painting. Since graduating with a Bachelor of Drawing and Printmaking from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018, Tarry-Smith has exhibited in over 25 national and international exhibitions. She recently completed the Printer Training Program at Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After returning to Australia, she has started Salt Press, a collaborative printmaking workshop specialising in lithography. Tarry-Smith is also a printmaking lecturer and technician at RMIT University.

“Across my practice, the wavering line functions as both image and meditative act, a means of exploring rhythm, repetition, and duration. Working across drawing, painting, and printmaking, I trace systems of movement in water, light, cosmos, shifting topographies, and dreamed landscapes, where observation converges with memory. Through slow, layered processes, forms emerge and recede, holding moments of transition rather than fixed representation.

I am drawn to the human impulse to recognise pattern as a way of ordering experience, while remaining attentive to the subtle deviations that unsettle it. Each mark: pressure, touch, adjustment, records an action, so that the surface becomes an accumulation over time. These constellations may suggest mapped or diagrammatic structures yet retain the irregularities that reveal the presence of the hand and the contingencies of making.” – Jennifer