You might read her as distrait e but actually I’d say she is concentrated. Her trousers are black and her neat riding boots decorated with a suggestion of gold spurs. She wears mannish specs and a mustard-coloured suede shirt thrown over a worn T-shirt – I cannot make out its psychedelic text. An unsecured plait, no wider than a shoelace, is starting to unravel in her long grey hair. She has the face of a dreamer – warmth mixed with distance. She is small for someone with such presence. As she turns around, she is all apologies and politesse. The book includes black-and-white Polaroids from her archive and images from her Instagram account (she has more than 1 million followers) and is, in common with the Pompidou show, a work of creative homage to writers, poets, friends and family. He dwells beside my copy of Ariel, given to me by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1968.’Īllowing artists to breathe is Smith’s forte – she is never more herself than when celebrating others – and our reason for meeting is A Book of Days, her beautiful new collection of 366 captioned images, one for each day of a leap year. The plate belonged to my mother who always tried to make me wear bright colours. ‘As a young girl, I admired the skater’s attire, eventually adopting the look as my own.
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