Jill Smith's Zodiac Journey

By Susan Mansfield, 16.11.2024

Jill Smith, Sagittarius performance from A Zodiac Journey. Photo by Mhairi Law

As part of the celebrations for its 50th anniversary year, the Fruitmarket has commissioned a year-long project by Jill Smith, the first woman artist to make work in the gallery - a woman who was nearly written out of its history.

Back in 1975, Jill Smith - then Jill Bruce, one half of a duo of pioneering performance artists with her then husband Bruce Lacey - made a piece at the Fruitmarket called 'The Manifestations of the Obsessions and Fantasies of Bruce Lacey and Jill Bruce'. However, it was recorded in the gallery’s archive as a solo work by Lacey. When the mistake was put right in February 2022, Smith was invited to make an event and performance, 'Re-emergence'.

“So I did that, and they put me back in the archive, and I thought they were done with me,” she says, speaking on the phone from her cottage on the west side of the Isle of Lewis. “I was really surprised and thrilled when suddenly there was this invitation to do something for the 50th anniversary over the course of a year. I was very excited, very honoured.”

Smith created a Zodiac Journey, an ambitious series of 12 “actions” beginning in September 2023. One took place each month representing a sign of the zodiac, at sites of spiritual and personal significance to her across Lewis and Harris. They were documented by photographer Mhairi Law and by Smith’s blog on the Fruitmarket website. The year-long cycle ended in August with Leo, Smith’s own birth sign, during the month she turned 82.

The work will be celebrated with events and an exhibition at the Fruitmarket in December, and an exhibition in An Lanntair, Stornoway, in February. “It was very satisfying, and a little bit of a relief,” she says, smiling. “It’s quite a commitment at my age. I feel I’ve done what I set out to do, what I said I would do. It feels like a great achievement.”

It also means that Smith’s work is being recognised by a new generation of artists interested in performance and ritual; her book 'The Gypsy Switch and Other Ritual Journeys' has a foreword by Jeremy Deller. The Fruitmarket’s are not the only records which have needed to be corrected to include her name either. 

She says: “I think there is a lot of rediscovery of women who have been sidelined, women who worked with male partners or in groups with men in them. There have been major exhibitions in recent years of the art which they did which is now being put out into the world.”

Smith trained as an actress at RADA and almost immediately began to make performances with Lacey, who was already known as an artist and performer. In London in the 1960s they were part of a boundary-pushing performance scene which included Genesis P Orridge and Throbbing Gristle among others.

Their own performances combined Lacey’s interest in robots and automata with Smith’s talent for costume-making; both became interested in sacred sites and rituals connected to the rhythms of the seasons. The performance staged at the Fruitmarket was one which toured to fairs, festivals and art galleries. By 1981, they had exhibitions in the Serpentine Gallery and Acme Gallery in Covent Garden.

However, in the early 1980s, Smith moved away from performance art, making solo journeys to ancient, sacred sites and performing her own private rituals. This grew into a personal, spiritual quest which took her on journeys the length and breath of Britain, and to Uluru in Australia. One journey from Land’s End, visiting stone circles and finishing at Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, led to an unexpected epiphany.

“I hadn’t been to the islands before, but I got off the ferry at Tarbert, went up the hill, and felt that I’d come home. It was a funny feeling as I don’t have any family or connections there but it felt part of me.” She returned to Lewis in the mid 1980s to live for ten years in a cottage at Gravit with a corrugated iron roof, no electricity and a single cold water tap, then returned again in 2009 to make the island her home.

The sites of the 12 actions on the Zodiac Journey were chosen for their personal significance, beginning by walking a spiral in the Achmore Stone Circle (part of the Callanish complex) and finishing with a labyrinth at Bosta Beach, Great Bernera. She describes the process of preparing for each one as “all-consuming”: she created four tie-dyed outfits, one for each of the four elements, and chose objects to use in each ritual reflecting different parts of her life. Some of the actions had an audience, some were done alone; for one she was joined by her daughter Saffron.

She says: “I do not consider these Zodiac actions to have been performances. They are part of my real life, places I go to privately. They have had a depth of spiritual reality for me. I like the term ‘action’, even though some of them were still and silent contemplations.

“This work seems to have woven together all sorts of different threads of my life, to celebrate the work I did as a performance artist, and then the work I did in spirituality when I went off on my own into the landscape and became better known outside the art world for my books and pastel drawings. This is bringing both back [together]. This project isn’t something I would have done if I hadn’t been asked. In a way it felt like completing something that needed to be completed.”

She says she has gradually come to a realisation that art is not only something which happens within the context of the art world. “Art is everywhere, not just in galleries, not just in the art world. Lots of things people do in their ordinary lives is art.
“I got very interested in neolithic things and originally there was no separation in people’s lives, their spirituality and daily lives, clothes, science, there wasn’t a thing called art. Everything they did was part of their sprituality, part of their daily life, there wasn’t this difference. When I did the landscape journeys, it was my spirituality and it was also art.”

Fruitmarket will host an exhibition and series of events to celebrate Smith’s work between 10th - 15th December.

An exhibition, Zodiac: Jill Smith and Mhairi Law, will take place at An Lanntair, Stornoway, 8th February - 1st March 2025