Tobacco and Honey is an installation collaboration between two artists; Kevina-Jo Smith and Helen Fitzgerald

Kevina-Jo Smith is an artist (amongst other things), who has been exhibiting for 8 years, currently living and working in Sydney. Her discipline is based in craft and textile. Texture and detail are of principle importance in her work, which are painstakingly handmade moving between various processes that include knitting, plaiting, weaving, drawing, painting, engraving; using repetition and pattern making. While her 3D assemblages may coax you into a scene of tribal sacrifice, her drawing and paintings contain so much intricate detailing they might blind you. She studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Melbourne at VCA (Victorian College of the Arts.) Kevina is fascinated by the notion of shelter and obsessively reusing discarded objects, within her work and everyday life. Window displays, music videos, short films, television commercials, all have her bowerbird touch.

Helen Fitzgerald is a Sydney based artist and set designer whose art is seated in installation-based practices. Working with found, foraged and fabricated material brought together to relate complex stories, re-told architecture. Helen studied a Bachelor of Arts in Design and then went on to complete her Masters of Art in Production Design for AFTRS(Film at the Australian Film and Television). Since, Helen has studied Sculpture and Installation at COFA (Collage of Fine Arts) and has been creating installations and sets for film, television, music and fashion. Interested in the idea of shelter and urban debris, Helen re imagines spaces, dividing up memories and re territorialising them in flexible improvised dwellings. In a combination of Beauty mixed with the grotesque, Helen creates a somewhat dystopian architecture of decay.

Tobacco and honey are opposites. They’re antithetical poles in the system of stuff. Tobacco smoke is dry, dry and bitter, moves upwards and stains the ceiling. Honey is wet, so super wet, so ardently wet that it sticks to everything it touches in its slow descent down. Honey is sweet and golden, tobacco is dead and tan.

Like bower birds Kevina-Jo Smith and Helen Fitzgerald collect very similar yet very different sorts of objects. Kevina collects all manner of everyday detritus; seeds, native plants, natural fibres, bottles. Helen uses collections of obscure material and pre-loved consumer oddities, a glove box of broken Christmas decorations. Kevina and Helen are intrigued by the capacity of personal adornment, the ability of an exterior to furnish an interior reality. The combination of their “stuffs” cultivates a ground from which to evaluate, inquire, come back to and re evaluate. Urban debris becomes the leafage and springing branch for modern nomads. A fantastic head-space that renders reality.

Exhibiting both locally in Australia, and internationally, Kevina-Jo Smith and Helen Fitzgerald have collaborated previously in an exhibition last year at China Heights gallery in Sydney.

For their most recent collaboration at Berlin’s Kuma Galerie, their practices are congealed together for a moment like Tobacco & Honey. The result is a temporal village interior, carefully planned yet naively exaggerated and improvised. Whilst their individual considerations are fraught and tension is palpable, Tobacco and Honey is at times beautiful but not always and the combination is bitter sweet.