Yasmin Smith presents her new ceramic installation Soft Water (2025) at the Borås Art Biennial 2026. The work shown at the Art Museum is part of her ongoing project Witness (2022-), which addresses the five extinction events in Earth’s history and the sixth mass extinction, which researchers argue we are living through now.

Soft Water examines the present extinction event with a focus on the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Manchester, England. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the rivers and canals of Manchester, connecting to the port of Liverpool, became the dumping ground for large amounts of toxic waste. Smith made ceramic casts of selected riverbed sites in the Mersey and Irwell catchment area. She then glazed the ceramics using a formulation derived from a scientific report analysing the heavy metal contamination in the sediments. Copper, chromium, and zinc relate to historic waste from chemical factories, blue and green dyes come from the textile industry, and lead pollution stems from intense coal burning.

The title Soft Water refers to the key role that naturally soft (low in calcium, magnesium, and metals) water played in the early textile industry, as necessary for cotton processing and the treatment of textiles. Alongside the ceramics, the installation includes industrial materials collected from the Manchester rivers and a Liverpool beach. The shape of the stand follows the contours of the river basin, with the ceramic sculptures placed in the corresponding river sites.

Yasmin Smith (born 1984 in Darug Country/Sydney; lives in Darug Country/Sydney, Australia) works with ceramics and experimental glaze chemistry. Smith researches different environments where she collects samples of plants and geological materials. From these, she creates ceramic casts, formulating glazes from their chemistry and creating ash glazes that relate directly to the life of the plants and the local soils. The glazed ceramics reveal unique chemical traces retained by the plants and rock – as a form of memory of the ecological and human histories of the sites.