Lachlan Smith is a painter born in Aberdeen, Scotland. Where he recently graduated from Gray’s School of Art and continues to develop his artistic practise that centres itself around Scotland’s Cairngorms.
He has received the following awards:
RSA New Contemporaries 2021
SSA New Graduate Award 2021
His most recent body of work examines the compact between engagement with nature and artistic practice serving as a form of self – referential inquiry. That ultimately aims to support the mental health and wellbeing of the practitioner, through means of engaging with pragmatic therapeutic processes.
Lachlan examines the discourse of such interactions, through the artwork and literature of creatives who share this understanding of recovery, direction and purpose instilled by means of re – attuning themselves with art and place.
This research, into the lives and work of artists who identified their practise as a conduit for recovery from mental illnesses, has informed Lachlan of the arts ability to support people diagnosed with manic depression.
People who suffer from this omnipresent mental illness, that is both immobilising and potentially dangerous. Bare symptoms that include drastic changes in mood, ranging from euphoric highs to crushing lows. Both states proving equally disturbing, as both lack the presence of any mediating position.
Historically the arts have played a role in locating this position for manic depressives, through engagement with such artforms as painting. That enable the manic-depressive painter to depict and seek out what is referred to as ‘The Middle Ground’. An embodied representation of a location, that establishes these periods of balance and intermittent calm.
This particular avenue of interest has allowed Lachlan to instigate a series of paintings that explore these themes further, through a visual means of developing related imagery, that stand to embody this metaphorical middle ground.
Lachlan’s ambition for these works is to inhabit a proposed psychological middle ground, making artworks that are supportive, strong but not dominant. Psycho – emotional landscapes, that crucially reflect such research interests, that are intended as a peace offering, that of indifference, devoid of judgment and imposition.