"I first encountered bird netting as a sculptural material while sitting on the porch of my high-rise apartment in East Toronto. Looking out my window, I noticed my neighbors would put bird netting on their balconies to keep pigeons from nesting there. This material—fine plastic netting that bunched and gathered—became not just a physical structure with which to make work but also a conceptual framework. So began years of inquiry into this material: a knotted grid, grotesque and beautiful, an explicit barrier used to keep species apart.” 

By manipulating ‘barrier materials’—including deer and bird netting, fiberglass screens, plastic webbing, and fishing nets—Sarah Stefana Smith explores how boundaries such as race, gender, and sexuality shape and define belonging. In the resulting wall objects, sculptural drawings, and installations, netting takes form as networks. Transformed through processes of mending and deconstruction, durable materials become malleable, connectivities emerge, and focal points blur.

In this exhibition, Smith explores the ecological implications of the plastics in these materials. Plastic takes on micro and macro forms, enveloping and entering the body; plastic waste chokes and constricts animal life; petroleum extraction damages the climate; islands of plastic trash form their own masses in the ocean. As the installation accumulates throughout the gallery, Smith’s sculptural forms also redefine and reshape our environment—barrier materials rupture, masses gather, and new networks take form.