Kasey Smith is a multidisciplinary artist/curator weaving together craft traditions and performance-tinged exhibitions to create unique, ephemeral art experiences. After studying Intermedia Art at UCSC, she spent two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area where she focused on making guerrilla art about local history and ecology. As of 2022 she now lives and works in the Netherlands, where she’s focused on a six-year series on the Dutch Masters and the painter’s guild system.

Personal Website : https://www.kaseysmith.net | Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/kasey_smith_designs/

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For the last four years I have been working on a series about Alzheimer’s/dementia, mourning, and memory. In this series, I ask surviving family members to name a small object that contains powerful associations with their lost loved one(s). Their favorite candy, a brand of gum they always chewed, a makeup shade they always wore, etc. I then gift the families a photorealistic painting based on this item. These paintings are done on paper infused with forget-me-not seeds and are designed to be planted, allowing the seeds to sprout and blossom, but at the expense of the art piece itself. A musing on who we are and what we leave for the future, it’s a small gesture of love, solidarity, remembrance, and acceptance that I started after losing both my parents to memory disorders.

1.  Your artistic journey spans craft traditions, performance-tinged exhibitions, and guerrilla art. How do you see these different practices informing one another in your work? 

I’m a big believer that the story and the storytelling method need to be aligned. Craft, performance, guerilla art; these are all very bespoke, hands-on disciplines that don’t tend to get a lot of institutional respect. If we’re going to be dismissive – or honest as the case may be – craft is often seen as unsophisticated women’s work, and performance/experiential art as overly pretentious nonsense, and guerilla art as criminal-adjacent. So they’re disciplines that more often than not fall through the cracks because what institutions don’t respect they don’t cultivate and they certainly don’t preserve. So it has felt very natural to explore questions of what we remember and how we consign things to cultural memory – or do not – within these disciplines that are themselves very intangible and overlooked. 

2.  You’ve worked extensively on themes of memory, mourning, and legacy. How has your personal experience of loss shaped your artistic vision?

As a younger artist, and especially as a student, my work was consumed with the dark side of loss. My father was an alcoholic and most of my art in the early 00’s was me processing his disease and inevitable death in rather morbid ways. Now that I’m in my 40’s, I’m much more interested in the other side of the coin, in exploring the act of remembrance divorced from the despair of my earlier work. It’s a powerful responsibility to be the one who carries on. The one who retells the stories and keeps the heirlooms and passes on the traditions and I want to celebrate that work instead of being mired in my sadness and rage. This didn’t happen overnight, mind you. But the more I focus outward with my art, the more I dwell on collective experience, and the more I invite other people in as emotional stakeholders the happier I become with the work. I guess I’m healed enough to turn my practice from art-as-therapy to something closer to art-as-collective-catharsis. 

3.    Crafting ephemeral art is a bold statement in a world that often prioritizes permanence. How do you balance the transient nature of your works with their lasting emotional impact?

That’s a big question. If I had a firm answer we wouldn’t be here talking because I would have wrapped up my art career, retired, and moved to a tropical beach somewhere. Exploring that rift is my calling – it’s not pushing paint or gluing collages or photoshopping pixels or any of the hundred other individual tasks that make up being a mixed media artist. Those are just my methods of exploration, they’re not the final destination. And if I ever reach that destination, if I ever close the rift, I suppose there won’t be any more art worth making.

4.    Your series on Alzheimer’s and dementia incorporates deeply personal stories through objects. How do you navigate the emotional weight of collaborating with grieving families?

The truth is that it’s HARD and I work very slowly and in fits and starts because of it. People are trusting me with their memories, with their grieving process, and in many cases with their trauma – you can’t ask people to share that and not hold space for their answers. If they want to talk about it I make myself available, but I try not to pry and never require big confessional statements from them. I also try to honor their participation by not sharing their names or backstories on the internet and by including little care packages with their paintings. I’ve lost six relatives to memory disorders – including both my parents – so I know the heaviness and sadness that can accompany these memories. I never want to pick at someone else’s scab. My goal with this series has always been to make people feel less alone and to make their memories feel more vibrant and significant. So I go slow, working when I have the bandwidth to do right by these stories and taking time off when I don’t. It’s not necessarily the most productive rhythm, but the work is better and I am better for it. 

5.   The use of forget-me-not seeds to create art that literally transforms into life is a profound metaphor. Can you elaborate on how this idea emerged and its significance to you?

I used to make a lot of guerilla art using California poppy seeds. I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time and exploring themes of worth and value in public spaces. I made all kinds of poppy seed bombs – ones painted to look like Faberge eggs and ones painted to look like common street litter – and I did all kinds of performances around them. California poppies are such a beautiful native flower so they were also a great example of the story and the storytelling method gelling with one another. But they would have been a terrible fit for the stories I wanted to tell around memory and remembrance so I knew I needed to use something else. Initially I wasn’t all that married to using seeds and seed bombs again. I knew I wanted something ephemeral and organic, something of the soil we all return to someday, but didn’t set out with a more specific goal in mind. But I kept coming back to the symbolism of forget-me-nots, of the plea for permanence inherent in the name, and it just felt right. Plus, they’re just gorgeous and who doesn’t want a beautiful memorial? 

6.    Paper mache, seeds, and watercolors are unconventional materials for photorealistic art. How did you decide on this medium, and what challenges have you faced while working with it?

The dirty secret is that I never studied painting and have no idea how to do it correctly. I am literally winging it all as I go. But this is where being a mixed media artist is a super power – you’re so used to forming ideas first, tactics second, and skills third that you become very good at teaching yourself new disciples. So in 2010 I had an idea for beautifying empty lots with seed bombs disguised as litter and I charted out all the ways that I could possibly pull this off – it got quite complex – and watercolors won out. At the time, I don’t think I’d touched a paintbrush in ten years but it was what the project required! So I had to learn! And the rest is history. 

7.    The idea of planting your art, allowing it to decay and give way to life, is powerful. Could you describe what it’s like to witness this transformation?

About ten years ago I made a series of seed bombs painted to look like Faberge eggs. Instead of gently placing them in a garden bed or a planter I broke them to release the seeds and the pictures of me from that performance are intense. I’m screaming and crying and laughing and it was definitely one of the more emotionally difficult performances I’ve done. They were so beautiful and fragile and I had spent so much time on them and then they were just… gone. 2025 me doesn’t really struggle with releasing art anymore, but it’s been fascinating getting to re-experience that vicariously through the Memory Seed Bomb series. They’re art! They’re a gift! They’re a memorial for a loved one! Of course planting the paintings and releasing the forget-me-not seeds is going to be complicated. And of course, I was so deep into my practice at the time that I didn’t expect that outcome. But of the fifty or so I’ve painted, I want to say only a quarter have been planted with maybe another quarter being saved for a special date. It’s okay, there’s no wrong way to mourn and there’s no wrong way to make art and there’s no wrong way to handle your Memory Seed Bomb once it leaves my hands. 

8.    You’ve transitioned from guerrilla art in the San Francisco Bay Area to a six-year project in the Netherlands. How has this shift in environment influenced your work?

I’m still making a lot of guerilla and ephemeral work but it’s true – this is the most “gallery-oriented” my work has been in a long time, simply by virtue of it being the most permanent. Going back to the symmetry of stories and storytelling methods – the work inspired by Dutch art history is a story of the art that survived. For every great master we remember, there is an immense and invisible sea of art that has been forgotten. Apprentices that never had the chops to make it, journeymen who never found the right patron, not to mention the individual paintings that weren’t noteworthy enough to be remembered. Hell, even Johannes Vermeer and Vincent Van Gogh were on a trajectory to be forgotten, which is mind boggling considering their prominence in the Dutch art canon. I couldn’t do these themes and these artists justice without mirroring the substantiveness of the art object. So I’ve had to rethink my relationship to ephemerality and permanence. It’s still a work in progress but I’ve been enjoying the challenge as it’s certainly not boring! 

9. Your current projects seem deeply rooted in the past and present. What themes or ideas are you hoping to explore in the future?

Right now I’m teaching myself how to make paint. The great masters didn’t have access to an art supply store, they had apprentices to mull and mix their pigments for them. So I think learning the craft will really help ground me in the history of great art and the nitty gritty details of how a masterpiece is made. Do I think I’m making a masterpiece. Noooooooooooo. But I want to walk in the shoes of the people who did, and this is one way to better connect with them and to understand the shape of their craft.

10.    Do you envision expanding the Alzheimer’s and dementia series, perhaps incorporating new elements or approaches? 

The Memory Seed Bomb series was always meant to end in an installation. I want the larger public to see how the paintings dissolve and grow, to see the stories and the memories they contain, and that can’t happen without putting a lot of the paintings together in one space. We’ll see if 2025 is the year that happens. I’m hoping it will be.