Rebecca Daryl Smith is a weaver and fiber artist with a practice that spans scale and media. With a BFA in fiber from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2012), and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (fiber, 2020), her career has traversed industry, television, fine craft and entrepreneurship.  Exhibiting nationally in group and juried shows and craft fairs, she explores moments of transformation, transference, intimacy and record through material and spatial actions and relations. She views craft as a tool for agency, problem solving, and societal progress and commits to life as an artist, educator, student and citizen Smith is currently the Artist-in-Residence in fiber at the Appalachian Center for Craft. She is an adjunct faculty member at Tennessee Tech University and co-founder of Lackland Well Artist Residency with Laura Oertel.

Smith’s practice explores sensitivity, relational development and states of becoming through accumulation, organization, and abstraction. Her process is a call and response between her hands and the materials, the materials and the structure, and the viewer and the object. She often ask: how do we adapt and grow in response to our environments, experiences, and relationships to one another? Her work employs cloth and craft practices to create fragile, contingent, and emotive works which provide quietude and sensorial intimacy. She acutely observes and translates moments of tension that forge balanced order and structure. For Smith, these harmonious yet precarious tensions are access points for sensitive and complex emotional and independent journeys. By abstracting the language, history and process of craft and textile, her work heightens awareness and shifts perspectives to participate in a conversation about both the trials and brilliance in our interconnectedness.