Smith / Stewart - Enter Love and Enter Death

Enter Love and Enter Death was Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart's solo exhibition made for Inverleith House. It was shown 3 November 2007 - 3 February 2008. 

Throughout the building’s seven rooms, handmade sculptural elements divided the space and the field of view in a typically pared-back way, leading the viewer to consider the building itself within the Garden beyond.

The elements consisted of identical girder-like sections, each tailored to fit the space, which contrasted with the delicacy and irregularity of their eighteenth-century surroundings and its more recent additions.

Placed at eye level, these beams seemed to confront and obstruct, the entire structure only comprehensible in the mind’s eye or imagination, occupying the borderline between the material and the insubstantial.

Concerned with a fundamental interest in the extremes of action and reactions, Smith/Stewart’s stark sculptural set-ups explored both personal and power relations (as did their early performance-to-camera video installations) and served to heighten awareness of ourselves and our surroundings.

This show presented for the first time a new body of work funded by the Creative Scotland Award which Smith/Stewart received in 2006, for; "a period of research, development and studio-based production towards an exhibition of a new body of 'live' sculptural installations which explore intimacy and threat."  A publication accompanied the exhibition.

Stephanie Smith and Eddie Stewart have been working collaboratively, as Smith/Stewart, since the mid-Nineties and have shown widely in the UK and internationally.

Awards include: SAC Artists' Award (2001); The Henry Moore Sculpture Fellowship, The British School at Rome (2002); Creative Scotland Award (2006). Their work is represented in public collections in the UK, Europe, the USA and Japan: including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; the Arts Council Collection, England and the Tate Collection, London. They work and live together in Glasgow.

This venue is supported by the Scottish Arts Council.