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Aaron Alexander Smyth (b. 1992) is an Irish interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the floodplains of identity and its formation, examining how identities are formed and informed by sociological and digital landscapes. Working across painting, print, and installation, he brings fragments of cultural memory into dialogue with contemporary references, using mythmaking and material experimentation to reveal the contradictions and truths cradled between our realities and fictions.
Through layered assemblages of art historical, cinematic, and archival imagery, he creates semiotic riddles that destabilise fixed readings and open space for reflection on belonging, entanglement, and the human condition. His practice is guided by Aby Warburg’s associative method of mapping recurring images across time, and by Karen Barad’s Agential Realism, approaching images and texts as dynamic interfaces that catalyse new knowledge. Toned through his Irish identity, these knottings entwine referential imagery, postcolonial theory, and lived experience to reflect our contemporary mythologies, contradictions, and truths.
Smyth holds a BA Hons with distinction from the National College of Art and Design (Ireland) and an MFA with distinction from the Glasgow School of Art (United Kingdom). He is a founding member of Gum Collective and has held artist residencies at the National Gallery of Ireland and the Royal Hibernian Academy. He is a Royal Scottish Academy John Kinross Scholar, selected New Contemporary 2025–2026 artist, and recipient of the Leverhulme Master of Fine Art Bursary. His works are held in in public and private collections.
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