Eden Arvad
(Paradise wanderer)
Designer Lis Rate-Smith.
Lis Rate-Smith’s collection of designer t-shirts are being shown for the first time at the Mind, Body, Spirit Festival at Addington Raceway, Christchurch, NZ on 26–27th September, 2009.
It’s been ten years since designer Lis Rate-Smith completed her Diploma in Fine Art at Taranaki Polytechnic in 1999. In that time she married artist-painter Dave Rate-Smith and the couple have two children.
Rate-Smith is working again; combining her love of fashion, form, design and screen-printing t-shirts. She says ‘it hasn’t been easy but it’s been her heart’s desire to get back into designing and making art in any form’.
And while it was a natural progression to make a series of designs for t-shirts, she said she had to push back in, after being away from art making so long.
‘It was a hard thing to find myself again through art, to find where I was creatively. It was difficult. I wanted to break new ground, and go into something new’.
The key factor driving Rate-Smith’s work is her Christian faith. ‘That would be what really inspired me to go after my dream of creating art’, she says.
She talks about becoming aware of a scripture from the book of Isaiah ‘run and not grow weary’. ‘I got the scripture’, she says, ‘I read it, I heard it, it was everywhere. I knew it was for me; I knew that an art work would be made but was unsure how I would do it’.
The designs, fabrics, fashion and form began to come together when she started the screen printing process; something she’d really loved all those years earlier. Besides, ‘it was a great and a comfortable way to get back into art’.
Her collection of t-shirts feature two core design themes. Interpreted in text, colour on colour, ink on cloth, the themes; Noughts and Crosses and ‘…run and not grow weary…’ make for thought provoking, wearable art.
Lis Rate-Smith
ratesmith@xtra.co.nz
Certificate in Foundation Art 1995
Diploma in Fine Art 1996 -1999
Taranaki Polytechnic
