Jill Smith – interview: ‘It was just me doing my thing, emerging from being forgotten’

Rituals inspired by ancient rites, pagan myths and respect for landscape and place underpin the work of the artist who, at 82, is being celebrated this month with her first major solo show

Jill Smith: Zodiac Journey, Sagittarius. On the Coffin Path by the Hag Mountain, Isle of South Harris, 26 November 2023. Photo: Mhairi Law.

by VERONICA SIMPSON

It is quite something to have your first UK institutional solo show in your 80s. Especially when you have been making art since your 20s, and maintained a thematic clarity, continuity and focus over nearly six decades. With Jill Smith about to enjoy major art world recognition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket gallery, what has caused this delay – apart from centuries of entrenched, art world chauvinism?

Smith’s work definitely has a place within the Venn diagram of interesting areas of art currently being celebrated. This year alone, we have seen new focus and attention being paid to indigenous ritual and practice (the 60th Venice Biennale), women’s and community/activist art (Judy Chicago, Sonia Boyce, and a multitude of group shows), the preservation and exploration of ancient sites, rituals and artefacts (Andrew Black, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran and Claudia Martínez Garay). There is greater interest than ever in magic, with books and podcasts on witchcraft filling the airwaves and book shops (including Time for Magic by Jamie Reid). For 2025, I know of at least two shows coming up that feature the art and illustrative traditions of Tarot.

Ancient, pre- and post-Christian wisdoms are highly pertinent to the practice that Smith has been evolving over 60 years, for the last 40 of which she has been based on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. But the artistry is in the way she personalises the resulting rituals and interventions, in a practice that encompasses performance, drawing, painting, textiles, poetry, prose and, above all, “ritual journeys” – the name she conjured in the 1980s for her overriding impulse to travel the pathways of a more nomadic ancestral civilisation, often with little more than a backpack, sometimes a tent, and for one year with her infant son, Taliesin. These fascinating journeys, often inspired by pagan festivals or the zodiac calendar, including her first arrival on Lewis, are recorded in her book The Gypsy Switch, published in 2019.

Jill Smith. Lyng Fairie Fair, East Anglia, 1981, Courtesy of the Artist.

In the 1970s, she toured the festivals and fayres (East Anglian Albion fayres, in particular) with her then partner, Bruce Lacey, performing under the name Jill Bruce. (Smith is her maiden name, but when she emerged from her Rada training, there was another actor called Jill Smith, so she took the name Bruce to avoid confusion, and presumably in tribute to the man she met at 17 and later married. She reverted to Smith in the 1980s). The couple, travelling with their growing brood of children, cooked up fantastical performances, reworking and embellishing existing myths with their own often science fiction-infused fantasies, complete with flamboyant staging with audiovisuals devised by Lacey and costumes designed and made by Smith. Lacey had been a star student at the Royal College of Art, awarded a silver medal, and their work drew intermittent interest from the art world, with shows at the ICA and the ACME Gallery in London, and one alongside Joseph Beuys’ Coyote Project at Chapter Arts, Cardiff. A 1975 show at the Whitechapel Gallery, titled Bruce Lacey: 40 years of Assemblages, Environments and Robots, re-emerged later that year at Fruitmarket gallery, Edinburgh, retitled: Manifestations of the Obsessions and Fantasies of Bruce Lacey and Jill Bruce. It was the first time Smith’s contribution was formally acknowledged.

Now, nearly 50 years later, Smith’s first solo institutional show is at the same gallery, in the final act of its packed 50th-anniversary programme – in recognition of the fact that she was the first female artist to exhibit when it opened.

Jill Smith with her son Taliesin and Lynne Wood at Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, Australia.

In the intervening time, Smith has never stopped researching and making art, visiting Ernabella Arts in Alice Springs, near Uluru (Ayers Rock), in 1983 to learn about Indigenous Aboriginal rituals and paintings. She has written for a variety of publications and has published three books. She has staged exhibitions with her spiritually infused landscape drawings and paintings and given multiple talks and slideshows. Smith’s “rediscovery” is part of Fruitmarket’s mission to celebrate undersung and overlooked female artists. To which end, in February 2022, it invited her to stage Re-emergence, a new performance work.

However, for this December show, the commission is on a different scale: Smith was invited to undertake another ritual journey across the Hebrides, invoking her own idea of the zodiac as embodied in sites that are significant to her, weaving in her own objects and actions each month, from September 2023 to August 2024. Her journals from each event are on Fruitmarket’s website, and the actions have been captured by the Lewis-based photographer Mhairi Law. These photographs, along with some of Smith’s costumes, textiles and ritual objects used within each action, will form  an atmospheric installation in Fruitmarket’s Warehouse gallery.

Especially gratifying to Smith is that a solo show has been scheduled at Lewis’s own art gallery in Stornoway, An Lanntair, in 2025, in a co-production with the Edinburgh gallery. It grants her a long-overdue moment of recognition as an artist within her own community.

Studio International spent time with Smith, a quietly engaging diminutive figure, softly spoken with an enduring north London accent, over two days, visiting some of the significant sites in her beloved, wild Hebridean landscape.

Veronica Simpson: From reading your book The Gypsy Switch, and looking at Zodiac Journey on Fruitmarket’s website, the inspiration for your art practice seems be sharing ancient wisdoms concerning our relationship to the land and the elements, and connecting with ancestors, living and dead.

Jill Smith: Yes, that was the whole initial inspiration. I feel here (Lewis), and especially when I’m at Callanish [standing stones, one of Lewis’s most popular ancient sites], there’s a feeling of sadness in the land, a feeling that people are not a part of the land in the way that they used to be. There’s nobody working on the land and the people and the land used to be one thing.

Jill Smith: Zodiac Journey, Capricorn. Old Grandmother Turtle rocks, Callanish, Isle of Lewis, 9 January 2024. Photo: Mhairi Law.

VS: Your work brings a sense of keeping that relationship alive and current, through the way you weave your own personal stories into this landscape and these sites, informed by some of the perceived intelligence from archaeologists and historians, but mostly from your own instincts and interactions.

JS: One thing I always say when I give talks is how, in ancient times, there wasn’t all this division. There wasn’t this thing called art, and there wasn’t a specific name for their spirituality or even the idea of science. I mean cave paintings weren’t art then. They were something spiritual or shamanic, or part of their hunting process. How much of that has been lost? So much imagery might have been on their clothes, the objects they used, as part of their spirituality. In Carmina Gadelica,* it talks about St Brigid, Bridgit or Bride, who was part of people’s everyday lives. And before the Presbyterians came (in about 1842), if they were Christians, they still had rituals, at Imbolc [a Gaelic festival] and made a little bed for Brigid and put a willow wand beside her. She was called on for childbirth and fertility and even just setting the fire for the night. It was just part of their life.

I think that’s why … I felt this great need to structure things into journeys, but it was all still part of my spirituality, and that became my art. I was making pictures because I didn’t want to photograph everything. I just wanted to experience everything, and I started doing pictures so I could share with other people what I’d experienced. I was thinking that was my art. But the whole thing is my art.

VS: That artistry and layering of years of thinking and actions is really apparent in Zodiac Journey, which is fascinating. How have you enjoyed this commission, this challenge to represent the Zodiac – for the first time – on these islands?

JS: It’s been wonderful. All these places are important for me, ones I go to year after year, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to get to them as I don’t have a driving licence. I’m very dependent on people for getting to these places … Doing the Zodiac Journey meant I could go to all the places at all the right times of the year.

Jill Smith: Zodiac Journey, Pisces. Loch Mheacleit, Aird Uig, Isle of Lewis, 11 March 2024. Photo: Mhairi Law.

VS: The pictures, taken by Mhairi Law, are beautiful. What was it like working with a photographer?

JS: It was very interesting for me working with Mhairi, as I had never done this before. When we were doing performances [with Bruce Lacey], it was so long ago, our children took photographs, but that wasn’t the object. We were just lucky to get some photos. All the years since, I have done things on my own, and I might photograph something, I might not. These are little things I do on my own that nobody knows about.

Mhairi is a wonderful photographer. I didn’t want to tell her what to do, but I soon realised that communicating my ideas was important for working together.

VS: I was interested to see that your Zodiac elements have little or nothing to do with popular astrology. It’s more of an exploration of ancient symbols, the cardinal elements of fire, earth, air and water, and some of the related mythologies. Tell me how you incorporated these elements into each action.

JS: For Aries, I chose a beach, in order to have a fire [Aries is a fire sign]. And because my daughter Saffron is an Aries, I wanted to do it with my daughter, I have brought her to the beach at Tigh nan Cailleachan Dubha (“the house of the black-veiled women”, thought to be a ruined medieval nunnery) a couple of times. It was a special place for me.

Jill Smith: Zodiac Journey, Aries. Beach by Tigh nan Cailleachean Dubha, Mealista, Isle of Lewis, 20 March 2024. Photo: Mhairi Law.

VS: What were the Aries objects and actions?

JS: Well, Aries is represented by a ram, but to me it represents all sheep, so I had a sheep skull, then we brought all sorts of products of sheep, like wool. My daughter and I have this collaboration where I knit cushion fronts using Harris wool and buy Harris tweed and send it to her at her home in Norfolk and she makes them up into cushions and sells them there. I was finishing off one of the knittings and giving it to her and then I gave her a piece of tweed. She had brought with her one of the made-up cushions and gave that back to me.

VS: You originally trained as an actor. Do you feel that the need to be more performative for these photos enriched the experience for you, because you had that earlier practice – as well as your years of performance art – to draw on?

JS: I felt that need to perform as a child, and when I wanted to be an actress, the few jobs I had afterwards weren’t very satisfying. When I started being a performance artist, it was like I was creating my own situations, instead of waiting for someone else to write something. It was much more fulfilling. Through doing all those performances in the 70s and early 80s, it was like a self-initiation … until I realised that I didn’t need to do [this performance] any more, I just needed to go out and really be with the place. That’s when I started sleeping outside and going on these long journeys. That need for performance disappeared … Doing this work for Fruitmarket, I didn’t regard them as performances, because they were things I was always doing. This was bringing in that element of performance, along with the objects from so many different threads of life and connections to people.

Jill Smith. Installation from performance and Gypsy Switch performance, Showroom Gallery, 1985.

VS: Your ability to be in the moment, to trust to luck or providence, really comes across in The Gypsy Switch. In all your travels and encounters with various people and places, there is a serendipity, an openness to whatever might happen next. Do you feel the spirit in which you travelled is also the spirit in which you work?

JS: I think so. Thinking about The Gypsy Switch, lots of different things worked out. For example, when we were travelling as a group with a horse and cart, we didn’t know how we’d be looked on by traditional travelling people, and they were fantastic. Their first question was: “Have you got a house?” And we didn’t have, we were living what we were doing. Even when I was walking on my own with Talie (her son Taliesin) and found this couple who were in a traditional wagon, they invited me round for breakfast, they got out the fine bone china, made a fire and made me tea. They didn’t mind how naive we were. They gave us advice and told us places to stop.

Jill Smith. Installation from performance and Gypsy Switch performance, Showroom Gallery, 1985.

VS: One of the things that really comes to mind in the Zodiac pictures is a sense of you working some kind of magic with these actions. Is that your intention?

JS: I think with this, it very specifically wasn’t. Sometimes I’m working with the weather, asking it to be nice. And when, like in Virgo, I opened the circle by honouring the directions, I wasn’t calling them in, I was just honouring. I have heard people say: “My dad says you’re a witch.” And up here I don’t want to be thought of like that. There are still a lot of Presbyterians who believe the saying: “Thou shalt not suffer witches.” I didn’t have any intention of doing that. But I also had the feeling of not wanting to do things wrong. When I did the Scorpio action, with photos of my family members, I put the serpent sculpture in the water to begin with, but I didn’t want the photographs to go in the water, because … I had an awful feeling it might wash them away or something might happen to them. I was very careful not to do negative things.

VS: So, there is a power in what you do?

JS: Yes. Probably.

VS: It feels, from spending time and talking with you, that it’s a very everyday kind of magic, like our normal superstitions – saluting when you see a pair of magpies or wearing your lucky pants when your football team is playing.

JS: Yes. Really these are celebrations. We are celebrating things … Celebrating place.

Jill Smith, Re-emergence – a performance in February 2022, Fruitmarket, Warehouse. Photo: Tiu Makkonen.

VS: When you performed your Re-emerging ritual at Fruitmarket, that was a powerful moment, I hear.

JS: Yes, I had planned a slide show and a performance, creating this spiral in sand. That was amazing. I hadn’t been doing performance for a long time. But I was so looking forward to that. When I woke up, that was the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. But I went very, very slowly, I went into the circle, laying out these bits of wood – three-million-year-old bits of wood that I had gathered on the shore here. Then I lit the lights, a whole spiral of lights. I was told that people felt sort of healed or that it felt like a good response to the awful things that were happening. It was just me doing my thing, emerging from being forgotten.

Jill Smith, Re-emergence – a performance in February 2022, Fruitmarket, Warehouse. Photo: Tiu Makkonen.

VS: Reading your Zodiac Journey, you are clearly drawing on a lot of scholarship.

JS: I have read a lot of cosmology … I don’t always agree with what archaeologists say. But I always like to know what they’re thinking. And also palaeontology. When suddenly they find a bone and realise it’s a new species of hominid. I’m very interested.

VS: You clearly have great sensitivity to this Hebridean setting. In The Gypsy Switch, you talk about feeling a deep sense of belonging the minute you landed here. Are you aware of a growing interest in these things that have always been part of your practice? There is certainly more interest in astrology now, and ancient rituals and sites.

JS: I don’t know. One important point for me, certainly when I was going off doing these journeys, it was nothing to do with the art world. But through my pictures, my writings – I wrote lots of articles for magazines – people got to know me and what I was doing.  On The Gypsy Switch journey, I wrote four articles for a magazine called Pipes of Pan while I was doing it, and it was amazing how many people got to know of me. I got quite a following of people who had nothing to do with the art world, but they understood what I was doing. And I used to go around giving slide shows with my artwork and photographs of places, and people would buy my cards and prints.

VS: Was it seen then within the context of folk history and culture?

JS: Somehow, something of what I wrote or drew resonated with people. I don’t know whether one can analyse what it all meant. It’s very interesting to me now that it’s being perceived as art, in a way that people in the art world haven’t wanted to see it for a long time.

VS: In your book, you talk about the sadness of the land and your hope that by your actions and journeys you might offer healing. Do you feel that your actions have made a difference?

JS: Yes, I’d like to think so. There’s an old saying about Callanish, that it would not do to neglect the stones. They need to be paid attention, and not just forgotten about. The stones are like living things to me. I think they’re quite strong. Though it’s all getting a bit much now: you get hordes of tourists coming in during the summer. I think the stones just withdraw themselves somehow. And then at night, they come back out. They are very dark, very black at night. To me, being here alone with them, they seem to have the energy of the ancestors, of the people who put them up, they’re very alive. I feel as if I’m being allowed to stand there with them. They seem to come in close and stand near me, protectively.

VS: Now that you have finished your commission, and are preparing to share your thoughts and rituals with a much bigger audience, how do you feel?

JS: It’s been very intense. I’ve lived each action before I performed it. There were times when I thought it’s all too much, I can’t cope. Then I would do it and it worked. It’s such a relief to finish the whole thing. I’ve done everything I said I would do, and probably more. I knew what was in my head, I knew I could manifest it, and I have done it. It’s lovely that Fruitmarket had that faith in me.

• Jill Smith’s Zodiac Journey is at Fruitmarket, EdinburgJill Smith’s Zodiac Journey is at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, from 10 to 15 December 2024, and includes a number of events, talks and performances. A monograph of the artist will be published to coincide with the show and can be ordered from Fruitmarket bookshop. A version of the show will be at An Lanntair Gallery, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, from 8 February to 1 March 2025.

*Carmina Gadelica is a compendium of Hebridean myths, songs, anecdotes and observations gathered between 1860 and 1909 by Alexander Carmichael and published in six volumes from 1900 to 1971.