Sally Smart

Sally Smart (born 1960) is an Australian contemporary artist known for her large-scale assemblage installations that incorporate a range of media, including felt cut-outs, painted canvas, drawings, screen-printing, printed fabric and photography, performance and video.

"[9] In her work Femmage Shadows and Symptoms (1999 and later), Smart used the word femmage [fr], created by feminist Miriam Schapiro, to explicitly link to historic traditions of women's making in many mediums and techniques, and feminist political discussions of such women's work,[8][12] with this large-scale installation "creating a surrealistic, dream-like pattern in which the viewer can discover suggestive images that are likely to trigger memories of childhood impressions".

One critic considered the name "a good analogy for Smart’s approach to making art",[8] partly referencing the surrealist technique exquisite corpse,[8] and also implying a strategy of breaking rules for profit, or, "In this case, for stunning visual invention, where phantasmagorical apparitions appear, wreak havoc and disappear into a sea of detail".

[8] Another reviewer perceived "a mass of fragments that are forever being reordered and rearranged to forge new meanings and modes of understanding .... Smart explores and eloquently articulates the complexities of these processes".

Questions of gender and identity are key concerns in her work, and Smart seek particular inspiration from, and engages with, early twentieth-century innovative modernist women artists.