Alison Smiles

Softer/Still is an exploration into the rich potential of internal pride in the absence of shame.
Resting in the strata of our emotional landscape, there often runs multiple veins of shame borne of
life experience, which contaminate our thinking and censor our full experience of life. Using the
conventions of the figurine and borrowing from the aesthetics of the Staffordshire flat-backs (a type
of press-moulded earthenware figurine common from 18th century Britain), these forms are larger
in scale and utilise bocage, a way of building an integrated structural support for the figure by using
elements of nature. The mounded ground and the cartoonish trees, which reflect the dusk/dawn
light, provide foundational elements to support the figures. Connected to the trees and the ground,
the figure’s limbs drive through the grassy tussocks and into the earth, with their bodies melding
into the trees to become one form. This structural device becomes a metaphor for the emotional
support experienced while being immersed and connected to nature, a phenomenon which makes
it unnecessary to feel shame at our shortcomings and foibles while we are ensconced in the
business of something more expansive than ourselves.