Meet the Artist/Author - Lindy Smith

Name: Meet the Artist/Author - Lindy Smith
Start: 2025-09-25T18:30:00-05:00
Location: 2629 Beaver Ave Ste S1, Des Moines, IA, United States, Iowa 50310

Schedule

Thu, 25 Sep, 2025 at 06:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

2629 Beaver Ave Ste S1, Des Moines, IA, United States, Iowa 50310 | Des Moines, IA

After spending several years working on a documentary photographic project about American ranch life that became a book, Straight West: Portraits and Scenes from Ranch Life in the American West, Lindy Smith started to become very interested in the many “weeds” growing on the farm where she lived in rural New York; everywhere she walked plants unknown to her were flourishing. Lindy Smith found her next project which became Leaves and Light: Sunprints of American Native Plants.
The prints started small in size as Smith experimented with watercolor and printmaking papers, various developers, light, temperature, humidity, and exposure times. As time passed, she collected taller plants, and the paper sizes became larger. She began with small diptychs, and later large triptychs and quadriptychs. She was fascinated by the unpredictability of the results this process offered. As she became more and more involved with this work, she started applying to, and being invited to, art residencies at various institutions around the country These offered uninterrupted work time and the opportunity to explore new ecosystems and their plants and she discovered working with tough dry plants in California and Wyoming was vastly different from those of the eastern woodlands and even the tall fibrous prairie plants of Iowa and Illinois. She began thinking of the work as conservationist in nature.
It has taken Smith a decade to learn to love this messy side of gardening with plants that have always belonged here; not unlike learning to love the unpredictability of making images of them under sunlight. It is seeing beauty in a different way and letting nature run the show as people will discover in this beautiful art book. In the preface, in part, Tom McGuane says, It is our luck that the eternal aspects of these daredevils have fallen to the eye of artist Lindy Smith who has used the sun in ways known best to her to reveal the souls of plants as lives, as archetypes, as semaphore. Their shapes seem to belong to dreams while for all their unexpectedness they are no more accidental than dreams. What we see emerges from the lives they’ve lived in deep time; their importance hangs over them as an aura.
“Smith has discovered the souls of so many plants I thought I knew and left their essential signatures on my mind that I will never see them in the same way again, or more to the point, forget them again.” –Tom McGuane, author of ten novels, including the National Book Award-nominated Ninety-two in the Shade
Lindy Smith received a degree in French and photography from Bennington College and received a certificate of completion at L’Universite de Caen in Normandy. She founded Visual Concepts, a display and interior design firm In Massachusetts. She returned to photography in 1992 after observing a Buck Brannaman horsemanship clinic in Wyoming, which led to seven years of documenting ranch life from Montana to Arizona. In 2000 she began making images under sunlight. This work is in many public and private collections.