Volk Gallery - Jessie Roberts-Smith

Volk Gallery is proud to present the work of storyteller Jessie Roberts-Smith. Each Volk artist is given a size limit and budget and left to their own devices. With this brief, Roberts-Smith has produced a riso-printed publication featuring a collection of notes she wrote on her phone (often in the middle of the night) while she was trying to comprehend growing a baby. It is the skeleton of a performance she shared at Scottish Dance Theatre a month before giving birth. Jessie sees this work as both a publication to be read in its own right and a document that honours that one-off performance, marking and celebrating a personal moment in life.

Artist's Statement

Jessie Roberts-Smith is a dancer and choreographer. For the last decade she has toured nationally and internationally with Scottish Dance Theatre. Alongside making and performing work with renowned choreographers, Jessie also makes her own solo and duet performances that reflect her life at that moment in time, these include So Long, and Slender, Daughters of Albion and Spindrift. Jessie recently became a mum and began developing a writing practice. Before going on mat-leave she spliced diary-entries and dancing together in a performance called Bambino Nella Pancia (Baby in the Tummy).

Jessie is interested in art that crosses disciplines and sits in the gaps, in order to reveal truth and meaning that is worth sharing with others. Rooted in the body, her practice is autobiographical storytelling through words and otherworldly movement.

Exhibition Dates
November 16th - December 11th 2026

The making of this work has been supported by Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre.

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