SOPHIE SMITH

ARTIST STATEMENT

What Is Missing series

This project responds to the overwhelming scale of forced displacement today. Children accounted for 51% of the global refugee population in 2015, yet their stories are often reduced to statistics. My series of portrait drawings explores the experiences of refugee children through a fragmented visual language. Each drawing reveals only part of a face and is displayed at varied sizes and positions to symbolise themes of loss, displacement, and identity fragmentation. I use charcoal for its tonal intensity and its fragility, echoing the precarity of the refugee lives uprooted by conflict. While I do not know these children personally, the act of drawing is very intimate, and the long hours spent rendering their likenesses is simultaneously time to reflect on their individual and collective struggles. I aim to rehumanise this crisis through detail, presence, and absence. Through my cropped compositions, I ask the audience to slow down and consider what is missing; home, family, identity and safety. My work is a project of recognition for those who are too often overlooked.

What Is Missing, 2025, Charcoal on Paper.