Tangled Painting

Rosie Galloway-Smith is a mixed media artist who creates paintings, drawings, sculpture, and digital pieces that explore semiotics, materiality, femininity and fractured identity. Rosie completed the Mlitt Fine Art Painting at Glasgow School of Art in 2018. She has exhibited extensively in Cumbria and internationally. News and updates can be found on her Instagram page, @rosiegallowaysmith. Recent public commissions include an installation of a washing line at Blackwell, the arts and crafts house in Cumbria, UK that was based on the county’s experiences of covid (Class, Covid, and Cumbria), and a piece called ‘Tangled Threads’ for Artful Ways Cumbria which looked at Carlisle’s relationship through cotton to the enslavement of people in Southern USA states. Clothing, particularly dresses, are a central and reoccurring theme, alongside other found objects. She sometimes uses construction and household materials to emphasise the relationships clothes have with structure, and ultimately, dereliction and her work plays with the history and meaning of different materials. Disintegration, fracturing, and morphing continue to interest her, especially as a way to explore a surrealist psychotic disruption of signifiers and meaning and through these means, make sense of contemporary and historical issues relating to modern Britain. The resultant pieces of artwork incite an emotional and curious response, feeling recognisable yet unfamiliar at the same time. Altogether they form an ongoing personal enquiry into fragmented meaning and experience. Her work has been described as dark, curious, edgy, vibrant, and texturally delicious. Expressing strong and ambiguous emotion is central to her work and each piece of work has a personal element. Rosie hopes to make space for the viewer to bring their own emotional responses and experiences to the piece. Born in England, and raised in Scotland and Cumbria, where she currently resides, Rosie grew up in an eccentric family with Roman Catholic parents and eleven siblings. Her childhood experience was one of being different to her peers, of having a unique home life where religious belief and making things for yourself played central themes. She completed her undergraduate degree in Fine Art at University of Humberside, Queens Gardens, Hull in 1996 and wrote a final thesis analysing the Virgin Mary using the work of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.