Lleah Smith works among pedagogy x socially engaged art x the curatorial, bringing practice-led and theoretical inquiry into relation.

Her research explores fermentation as M5 material, metaphor, method, methodology and manners: a porous mode for thinking, making and doing together.

It considers how practices activate, contaminate and sustain one another, and how agitation, difference and messiness can generate movement, pressure and change.

Through this mode, practice is understood as ongoing, collective and reactivatable rather than complete, singular or contained within one discipline.

Smith is enlivened by the possibilities of bringing together diverse bodies across ages, cultures, and disciplines.

At the heart of her enquiries is a deep curiosity in how knowledges move…

She considers dialogical processes, hospitality and friendship as the foundational building blocks for radical and relational work.

Smith is interested in what ‘structures’ and ‘systems’ render and limit possibile forms.

She plays with productive agitation as a mode where discomfort becomes generative. Here, agitation is a living presence—a pulse, a force—through which collective processes open toward pressure, possibility, and relation.

She turns to queer, disability scholar and activist Mel Y. Chen (2018) in tending to this work, Chen asks “What might it mean to focus on the embodiment of agitation as a form of living presence... rather than on the strategies used to kill it?” (p. 551).