The World of the Watchers
The Watchers
(except from “Something to hold on to” by Ana Harbec)
Not just beautiful, though—the stars are
like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing.
And they’re watching me.
– Haruki Murakami
Have you ever felt the benign but intense sting of unseen eyes upon you? Perhaps the tiny forest of downy hairs on the nape of your neck stood suddenly at attention, pulled up magnetically by the unknown gaze in the same primordial way young sunflowers move their heads throughout the day to face their obvious god: the Sun. Maybe you craned your neck quickly, so sure were you that someone, something, proximate was looking. Who’s there? Though in this strange encounter (that I suspect has some kind of universality) the watcher remains unseen, occluded, concealed, invisible, they are none-the-less felt.
Artist Stefanie Smith has spent the better part of her year at the Medalta International Artists in Residence program carefully building a world that seeks to give form to such typically invisible watchers. Smith’s whimsical ensemble of mythological characters, hand-built and wheel-thrown in porcelain and then meticulously etched into being, feel distinctly archetypal and circumstantially ancient.
The vast and sprawling mythological canon of ancient Greece includes, for example, dryads—mythical tree spirits, whose stories curl and wind throughout the follies and the triumphs of the gods and demi-gods. An ever constant amid the drama is the dryad and her tree, quietly observing the tumult of Greek mythology whose cadence is more akin to our frenzied world than the slow peaceful amble of the forest. In Japanese Shintoism, the Kodama are watchful and enigmatic spirits that protect the forest and ardently observe those who traverse their arboreal realm. Medieval European churches, cathedrals, and architecture, broadly, are replete with occurrences of the pre-Christian holdover Green Man, an arcane sculptural element comprising a face shrouded by foliage and flora. Often inconspicuously situated on a cornice, the Green Man simply, quietly, watches. The first section of the ancient Aramaic Judeo text The Book of Enoch is entitled “The Watchers.” It details the trials of a group of fallen angels tasked with watching over humanity. Watchers, it seems, are proliferous across time and tradition.
The Watchers
May 23-July 12, 2025
Yuill Family Gallery in the Medalta Historic Clay District, Medicine Hat Alberta
This exhibition was created in conjunction with the Yearlong Artist in Residency program at Medalta, and was made possible in part with support by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Though Smith’s creatures, some which populate a many-branched central fungal armature (itself reminiscent of Yggdrasil, the cosmic Norse ash tree, the principal structure that binds all realms of existence, or more contemporarily the Great Deku Tree in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda) are singular and not specifically homaging or referencing the cultural touch points I’ve noted here, they engage tacitly with this rich mythological canon of the spirits who watch. In her exhibition you’ll find wondrous chimeric beings, at once hooved, winged, and scaled. The antlers of Smith’s deer are tender fronds of otherworldly exotic plants. Owl-like faces grace her marine creatures’ piscine forms, rendered in classical—but here, surprising—composite poses. The more canine-seeming beings in the artist’s preternatural world recall the Capitoline Wolf, suckling Remus and Romulus. Mythologies intersect and abound in “The Watchers,” though in a wholly exceptional permutation. In Smith’s verdant realm, as in the lores of centuries and millennia past, the common feeling of a frisson is surely the requisite outcome of being watched.
