Charles Smith
Image source HMASS Sydney II Memorial Geraldton
Charles and Joan Walsh-Smith are a team of Sculptors and Designers specializing in large scale public art projects based in Perth, Western Australia from where they work internationally. They met in art school, at age 17,in Ireland and have been working together ever since, principally creating large-scale public sculptures around the World.
Having spent most of their lives living ‘within’ nature, rather than cities, their creative responses are finely tuned to the elemental forces, driving the natural world around us.
They are constantly evaluating their personal context, within the awesome processes visibly shaping their reality on a moment to moment basis. As a result, over the years, their work has gradually tended towards expressing certain universal qualities of human experience, through metaphor and form; essentially attempting to reveal elements of the underlying qualities of the human consciousness that binds, not only us as human beings, but the entire Cosmos together.
Lofty notions, perhaps, but certainly the basis for their primary interest in creating spiritual markers and placing them, like sign posts, for those who follow down the river of time. They see nearly all their creative efforts as memorials of one kind or another, which they launch into history, like time capsules, hopefully carrying intelligible messages which will communicate something of what we, as a Culture thought, felt and acknowledged as being fundamentally important and therefore worthy of expending the necessary wealth and energy to create these objects and abandon them in time.
