My interdisciplinary practice begins in attention: what I see, what I notice, what energies affect my body. I explore the intersection of these discoveries with generational stories and epigenetic markers. It is a practice of material and matter congealing with idea and form. My twenty-year career as a public school educator casts a distinct, research-driven foundation for pedagogical and experiential knowing, for how we hold space for each other in community

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My engagement with varied media originates in my childhood in upstate New York, where I had access to streams, forests, and fields. Nature was my first studio. I would aggregate, design, and construct small grass weavings, drawings of dandelions, and compositions of moss, leaves, and sticks. This ebullient freedom created a foundation of percipience and agency for my practice; text and visual converge, science and cheesecloth hold hands, and the abstraction of the natural environment intersects with the maternal. I integrate the plausibility of strife and discord as moments of evolution and growth.

Victoria Smits studied English, art, and secondary education at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, received a Master of Arts in English Education with a concentration in creative writing from University of Buffalo, and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts through the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Smits has exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, Texas, the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, New York, the Manchester Craft and Design Centre, Manchester, UK, and Cascade Paragon Art Gallery in Portland, Oregon. She has poetry forthcoming in Gone Feral from Demeter Press.