IJda Smits | IJBer
About
IJda Smits is a visual artist, poet and writer whose work moves between photography, printmaking, artist's books, poetry and text. What connects these different forms is a sustained curiosity about how people create meaning in the world around them.
Throughout her life she has worked with a wide range of materials and techniques. She has painted, made prints, built websites, written poetry and essays, and now works extensively with historical photographic processes such as cyanotype, Van Dyke Brown and gum bichromate. The medium itself is never the destination; it is a way of exploring questions.
Plants, branches, seed heads, shells and found objects frequently appear in her work. They are not used as botanical subjects but as points of departure for reflections on memory, time, transience and presence. Her artist's books, visual series and texts often emerge from long periods of observation and experimentation.
Philosophy, literature and poetry have always been important influences. The writings of Gaston Bachelard, the Japanese concept of ma - the meaningful space between things - and the Taoist principle of wu wei resonate strongly with her way of seeing and working. Not as theories to be applied, but as ideas that share an affinity with attention, openness and wonder.
Although she has spent her life working as an artist, she has often described herself, somewhat playfully, as a tinkerer. Not because she takes the work lightly, but because the word preserves a freedom to experiment, to change direction and to follow curiosity wherever it may lead.
Her work rarely begins with a fixed plan. More often it starts with a question, a found object, a plant encountered by chance, a line from a poem, or an unexpected reaction between paper, light and chemistry. Making is, for her, a way of thinking.
Recurring motifs in her recent work include trees, vessels, shells, plants and crows - images that reflect change, loss, continuity and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Her work moves between observation and imagination, between the tangible and the unsayable.
Curiosity has always mattered more than ambition.
She creates not to become something, but because making itself is a way of being in the world.
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