Shellie Smith

Shellie Smith is an Awabakal artist whose creative practice explores cultural sovereignty, relational knowledge, memory, and the continuing presence of Awabakal culture within contemporary public space. Working across weaving, sculpture, installation, archival research, and site-responsive practice, she reawakens cultural-making traditions through processes grounded in Country, material engagement, and community relationships. 

Her work brings together cultural fragments drawn from archives, family histories, oral knowledge, landscape, and embodied making. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed historical record, Smith approaches it as a living and contested space in which cultural knowledge can be revisited, reinterpreted, and returned to contemporary practice through culturally accountable processes 

Central to her practice is the understanding that knowledge is generated through interconnected ways of knowing, being, and doing. Materials are not simply creative media but active participants in relationships among people, Country, Ancestors, and place. This relational approach informs projects ranging from temporary installations and public artworks to gallery exhibitions and community collaborations. 

As an eighth-generation Novocastrian and proud Awabakal woman, Smith’s work asserts the ongoing presence of Awabakal cultural practice while creating spaces for dialogue, remembrance, and contemporary expressions of Indigenous identity.