Working across mediums, Lexie Smith’s current primary forms are bread and language, though she design things on screens, too. Based in Queens, New York, Lexie runs Bread on Earth, a site dedicated to the tangential exploration of our politicised and intimate relationship to grain, a projects she launched in 2016.
She also creates bread sculptures which are preserved in beeswax, plaster and hemp twine. Alongside this, she makes abstract recipes and portraits, as well as bread masks. Smith also utilises the medium of drawing.
Creating edible installations, sculptures and prose with — and about — bread, Smith uses food not only as a medium, but also as a means of exploring culture. For her, there’s nothing more telling about a society than the way they engage — or don’t engage — with bread. “It holds within it a large spectrum of the human experience,” she says.
“For me, it’s as much about not creating waste, as it is not being attached to some flippant product of my hands that I really try not to attach ego to,” she explains.
“Bread is a really universal thing, but also a really intimate symbol that’s at once representative of both completely different sides of the economic scale. So, it represents the linguistics and actuality of money, just in the color of bread, and then all the way down to being the ultimate symbol of the peasant masses.”
“Bread is about so much more than bread,” Smith tells Bustle. “Bread is present in and steeped with the politics of identity, history, economics, and the environment, in nearly every culture on earth. This makes it easy to see as a yoke between places and peoples, and in many ways it is, but it also delivers us evidence of just as much human conflict, divisiveness, manipulation, and selfishness. The reason bread is a captivating and rich medium is because it can show both of the sides equally.”
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