I Burn, and Yet I Live. Mark Smith
October 12 - November 9, 2023
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From 12 October to 9 November 2023, Atticus Gallery proudly presented I Burn, and Yet I Live, a new body of work by British artist Mark Smith, curated by Sasha Burkhanova-Khabadze. Known for his meditative engagement with materiality and memory, Smith here turns his attention to the quiet ruins of British domesticity—scraps of the built environment reassembled as poetic relics of cultural fragility.
In this exhibition, Smith centred his work around salvaged wooden window frames, once found in derelict countryside cottages and post-industrial terraces. These frames, charred using the traditional Japanese method of Shou Sugi Ban, were transformed into sculptural elegies—burnt, blackened, and beautiful in their endurance. Each piece bore the tension between destruction and survival, offering a visual meditation on impermanence and the persistence of cultural spirit in the face of historical erosion.
The title, I Burn, and Yet I Live, borrowed from a line by a 17th-century English devotional poet, offered a poignant counterpoint to Smith’s austere material language. Under Burkhanova-Khabadze’s curation, the gallery became a site of reflection, its minimal installation and dim lighting allowing the works to speak in hushed tones. Visitors were invited into a contemplative space—not just to look, but to listen: to the timbre of scorched wood, to the absence held within empty window frames, to the act of survival itself.
Smith’s practice often engages the aesthetics of repair and absence, and here, that ethos deepened. The works on display were not nostalgic, but elegiac. These were not windows onto the past—they were thresholds. Each piece reminded us that culture, like timber, weathers, darkens, and cracks—but does not disappear.
I Burn, and Yet I Live marked a significant chapter in Mark Smith’s evolving practice. It offered a solemn yet dignified reflection on loss, craftsmanship, and what it means to carry history in the grain of the everyday.Location:
Atticus Arts Gallery, 11a Queen Street, Bath
