I am a performance artist and writer based in Merton. I hold sensory story-telling sessions in settings including hospitals, community centres, schools, galleries, for groups of all ages. These are focused on story-telling through: drawing, writing, movement, film, sensory tasks, everyday sensory materials, other art forms relevant to the group. We use these different media as ways to create, imagine, dream together. Alongside these, I am currently offering 1-1 creative writing intervention sessions and 1-1 tutoring for Art GCSE and A-level. Email me to book a slot: katherine.smith@gmail.com.
Settings I have worked with include Heron Academy, Great Ormond Street Hospital, South London Gallery, Tuke School, John Chilton School, Morden Library, Royal College of Art and many others.
The work I do is strongly inspired by and connected to work by other artists and thinkers. These are usually within the areas of sound, performance art, liberatory pedagogies, disability justice and play, including: bell hooks, Mia Mingus, Paolo Freire, Stuart Lester, Tehching Hsieh, Pauline Oliveros, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Marginal Consort, Trisha Brown, Alice Wong, Lama Rod Owens, Joanna Grace, Stefanie Kaufman, Judith Butler.
For more about me and my work, see here.
RECENT PROJECTS
The Manifesto Project, performative text published in Morden Library catalogue, co-created with working age adults in Morden Library, commissioned by Merton Libraries (2023-2025). The work focused on real-life storytelling: imagining and dreaming generous, embodied structures to hold us in our lives. What do we want for our collective futures? Co-writers: Emiko Okoturo, Christine Waller, Daniel Foot, Ambrine Boukhalfa, Ruma das Ray, Kwame Adjeikum, Silvia Leal de Oliveira, Zoe Burden, Catherine Barrell, Agnieszka Grayling, Alex Lewis, Tina Nene, Claudine, and others.
With the whole school at Heron Academy – all young people and staff – between September 2023 and January 2024 I co-created a film about a cloud that comes to visit the school. The cloud floats up and down, around and around, until… we are in the cloud. https://katherinesmithart.co.uk/collaborative-actions/
Lost in the Maze was created by students in Years 9-11 at John Chilton between November 2022 and March 2023. One day, when P4 Violet are minding their own business, some yellow string appears. They follow the string to see where it goes. The string helps lead them along, and then… it gets tangled. P4 Violet asks, what if you got lost in your everyday spaces? What if you got tangled? What if you couldn’t get free? Lost in the Maze was screened at Odeon Acton in April 2024.
I ran Creative Writing through Art sessions in community spaces in Merton between 2014 and 2020. Here’s an example of a publication of stories we created together in 2018.
I ran Creative Writing through Art lunchtime and after-school clubs at The Study Prep between 2018 and 2020. Here are some stills from a puppet show we co-created. We performed the show to students’ adults/carers/parents.
In weekend and holiday community sessions in 2018-2019 we co-wrote scripts which we produced into short plays that we made puppets and settings for and performed to parents/carers. Stories include: King Shark, Zoo Taken Over by Monsters, Monster Play.
Between 2019 and 2021 I ran sensory storytelling sessions with the GOSH Play Team, initially on zoom and then in person on Lion, Elephant and Giraffe Wards (oncology).
Students in Years 12-13 at John Chilton Special Community School asked what would happen if the school got taken over by an evil doll. When this happens one day, after an argument in the playground, everything falls apart: the classrooms, the corridors, the hall…and even the staff. And then what happens? How do we get through this unravelling together? Screened at John Chilton School Assembly on 31 March 2023.
sensoryarts.co.uk 