It’s mid-summer in Melbourne; usually a sluggish time. But artist Sally Smart is a fountain of energy.
“It was strange coming back when everybody is powering down and I'm completely powered up,” she laughs.
Smart has just returned from spending the European autumn at the American Academy in Rome as the 2025 recipient of the Mordant Family x Creative Australia: Affiliated Fellowship.
Through the residency, established Australian visual artists live and work alongside artists and scholars from around the world. It’s designed not with the expectation of an output of finished work, but as an intensive period of research and exchange of ideas. Past participants include Lynne Roberts-Goodwin, Jenny Watson, Alex Seton, Barbara Campbell, Reko Rennie, Angela Valamanesh and Khaled Sabsabi.
“It’s actually taking me a while to settle down because it was so fantastic and stimulating,” Smart says. “Along with the new work, the experience has created many connections and ideas for future projects.”
Smart is known for her impactful large-scale installations that draw on collage, painting, photography, embroidery, sculpture and performance and explore identity politics, gender hierarchy and relationships between the body, thought and culture.
The Fellowship appealed to Smart’s existing interest in early modernist avant-garde art in Italy in the early 20th century and the intersection of art and performance.
“I had a decade of experiences and research that related to Rome and was probably compelling,” she says of her application.
Smart is no stranger to Rome, including through her 2023 exhibition The Artist’s Family with PostmastersROMA gallery.
“I made a body of work, assemblage sculptures, with small bronze heads and embroidery elements drawing inspiration from modernist artists’ hand puppets, dance costumes and Commedia dell’arte personages,” she says.
This exhibition led to an invitation to stage interventions across nine rooms at the Museo Boncompagni Ludovisi, an historic Palazzo home-turned-museum in Rome. Her exhibition The Artist’s House was a dialogue with the museum’s collection of 20th century fashion, including Elsa Schiaparelli. Over several rooms Smart exhibited works responding to the modernist clothing experiments of Giacomo Balla and Sonia Delaunay, presented on mannequins adjacent to Italian Modernist objects and Futurist paintings (including those of Balla).
That project led Smart to Casa Balla, the Rome house of Futurist artist Giacomo Balla and his two artist daughters Luce and Elica, and sparked an interest in early Futurist avant-garde.
“I was most interested in the performance works and how the artists represented their identities in their small domestic spaces, along with learning about the women artists, often partners and, in Balla’s case, his artist daughters.”
The Fellowship offered something transformative: time, space and a cohort of creative and intellectual peers at the American Academy. Smart describes an immersive and disciplined daily rhythm of live-in studios, shared meals and conversations, history lectures, museum visits and an easy drift into the historic city beyond.
“As an artist you need to be open to possibilities, and they were certainly there,” she says.
Smart hosted two open studios with neighbouring artists in the Academy, and found herself in daily conversation with other visiting Fellows whose fields stretched across vast swathes of time and focus.
An Etruscan scholar saw connections between sculptures he was researching and Smart’s work, while a poet wrote a poem in response to visiting the ancient Boxer at Rest bronze sculpture at the National Museum of Rome with Smart.
“It's wonderful, this deep, meaningful conversation that unfolded getting to know each other,” she says.
Smart’s usual processes to make finished work can be complex. Her studio practice in Rome was deliberately pared back both to travel lightly and because producing a finished body of work was not her sole focus.
“I was interested to create works that I could develop fully later. Therefore, drawing was going to be fundamental in this process. I was collecting imagery for performance and working on choreographic notes for dance works. Along with Futurist artists I was also looking at Arte Povera works. So working with simple means was a conceptual concern. I made monoprints and drawings on paper, and also puppet sculptures from everyday materials,” she says.
“Drawing became for me a daily ritual. A beautiful Rome practice was being formed through these works.”
Each day Smart took long walks and created a living archive on the walls of her studio at the American Academy.
“I documented with images from my phone, printing them out and pinning them to the studio wall, and week after week, various connections between the images were revealed, purposely and surprisingly too,” she says.
That visual diary has given Smart several clear bodies of future work she has now started back home. She has reconstructed parts of the diary on her Melbourne studio wall but also admits what cannot be replicated.
“I can't get all of Rome in my studio, but I feel something tacit has been embodied.”
What she does carry is a changed relationship to her own work.
“I have a new way of feeling for materiality and how I might approach this in aspects of my new work.”
Smart is talking with several curators and artists she met in Rome about new projects that could span several years. It's a timeline she's taking in stride.
“It’s Rome and it’s 2000-odd years of history. Things don’t just happen tomorrow, which I found so liberating, the different temporalities, thinking about that by being in Rome. That’s special and those mental spaces that you can create because of that backwards and forwards of time,” she says.
“It is a gift. It’s a great experience to have happened.”
Applications for the 2026 Mordant Family x Creative Australia: Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome are open until Tuesday 3 February 2026 at 3pm AEDT. The successful applicant will be notified in April 2026, with the residency dates to be negotiated.
