Anna FC Smith

Born in Leigh, UK

Lives & works in Wigan, UK

 

Born in Leigh, UK

Lives & works in Wigan, UK

 

​Anna FC Smith is a Wigan (UK) based multimedia artist. She studied Critical Fine Art Practice at the University of Brighton, graduating in 2007, and has exhibited internationally.

 

Smith’s practice is rooted in ritual, folk culture, folklore, communal activity, civic participation, and the symbolism of placemaking and governance.

 

She explores how community is shaped and expressed through historical and anthropological research, co-creation, and creative engagement. Her work investigates how communities articulate identity and  agency, and form meaning. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which groups and societies, both formal and informal, manifest through spatial, ceremonial, and material practices.

 

Drawing on both past and present material culture, Smith’s work connects myth, and the politics of everyday life. She juxtaposes the inclusivity, irreverence and humour of vernacular traditions and dissent, with the spectacle and ceremony of institutional governance, examining the performative dimensions of both. 

 

Her methodology combines research-based processes with artistic production, generating allusive and symbolic, multi-dimensional assemblages that integrate performance, text, and participatory action. Her works reflect on the symbolic and procedural architectures of society, and on the potential of creative practice as a site of civic imagination.

 

Smith’s orientation towards the political developed through her upbringing immersed in activism, debate, and community engagement. Raised within a family of politicians and grassroots organisers, she experienced early exposure to the performative and procedural aspects of collective decision-making, from campaign rooms and trade union centres to the rituals of governance. This background has fostered a sensitivity to group identity creation and informed her sustained interest in the intersections of place, participation, informal acts of community care and the dramaturgy of the public sphere.

 

Her research explores how traditions, place-based knowledge, and the residual materiality of the past can act as interpretive frameworks for contemporary ecological and social concerns, positioning artistic practice as both a critical and connective mode of inquiry within civil society.