It’s a practice refers to the artist’s process.

It’s a practice reveals itself in exhibitions that include and rely upon these processes for their aesthetic.

The ‘it’s a practice’ way is more likely to produce sets of objects than pictures.

The ‘it’s a practice’ way of making is a lateral display of thought patterns and sets of notions that hang together.

It’s a kind of image algebra.

The‘it’s a practice’ way of making and exhibiting has come to mean ‘Contemporary Art’. Maybe I should not say ‘mean’ but instead say ‘look’ like contemporary art. If it aint alternative non-art materials (for example plywood, or cardboard or haircuts), it aint contemporary art.

In a recent conversation a colleague suggested this gives the “appearance of experimentation”  with out actually being so. He has spotted a generation of kids flipping through art magazines - spying on Ricky Swallow or early Mike Kelley and repeating the mechanisms ... just following the path. The result is a prevailing kind of “post-Duchampian grunge”.

God knows I have bowed to the bucket bong of Hany Armanious ....

It seems to me the word ‘Contemporary’ has come to bear the same sluggish weight as ‘Modern’. It hangs in the air just as heavily and means nothing; a set of colours, a canon of motifs, a stack of psycadellic T-shirts and a comment on a Myspace profile. Something ‘Mum’ could say, and ‘Dad’ would understand. When the terms have caught up and the Museums use them in their titles, you know the ‘you know what’ its not hitting the ‘you know what’ no more.   

Kate Smith - artist's statement