Lexie Smith
"I'm writing you guys a new recipe and have the dough fermenting now (a sourdough with rye, buckwheat, mallorcan carob and black sesame seeds)."
In December 2018 we commissioned baker, reader, writer and artist Lexie Smith to design a postcard to accompany Jean Rhys' Collected Stories. The following show just a partial portion of her yield. A recipe that reads like a poem, a voice recording over a how to video, and a series of self portraits alongside that bread sculpture. One year on we visited Lexie and her extensive book collection at her home in Queens, New York that included
- Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition
- Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz
- The Testament of the dead Daughter by Rene (Colette Thomas)
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
- Blood Bread and Poetry by Adrienne Rich and
- Annie Baker's The Flick.
Lexie Smith at home in NYC, taken by Quentin De Briey in November 2019.
Bread On Earth x iD was filmed and directed by yasmine diba.
After our most successful month at Senb00ks we are looking forward to sharing new
discoveries with you all more so than ever. As the days finally shorten a little too far and the
cold weather start biting, we are moving onto new artists this month that explore isolation
and loneliness that we all feel to some degree much more as our lives move indoors for the
winter. Not that this must be in any way a miserable journey, quite the opposite in fact. Our
two chosen artists this month both ponder over the emotions of fear, isolation and loneliness
and explore them in relation to how we can all be brought together, how we can all identify in
common passions and how we can seek comfort and inspiration from shared ideas, tastes
and beliefs even when we feel our most isolated or alone. Which one of us hasn’t, at times of
varying sadness, cooked a familiar meal from our childhood or called up a bad ex-boyfriend,
climbed into a beaten-up stretched out old jumper or sought refuge in a tattered book? The
things that connect us most are often symbolic and complicated. For these reasons and for
many more this month’s book will be The Collected Short Stories of Jean Rhys sent out with
a postcard from Lexi Smith, a multi-faceted artist that we have been obsessing over on
Instagram for some while now, and we couldn’t think of a more perfect pairing.
Lexi works in a variety of mediums as an artist but some of her most arresting work has seen
her working with bread, manipulating it into beautiful sculptures. She is a New Yorker
through and through, but her work has much to say about ‘cultural anthropology with bread
as the lens.’ She has recently travelled to India to explore ‘the women…and what sacrifices
they’ve had to make to maintain tradition.’ Her work into understanding the changing
relationship between tradition and modernity is something she shares with Rhys who also
travelled the world in her life and sought to understand the inner condition of the women
she met at both ends of it. Lexi’s edible bread exhibitions invite us to question our own
relationships to bread as a launchpad onto issues concerning societal and personal
consumption. When we feel bad or alone, many of us turn to and end up having negative
relationships with our food, sex, love and friendships. And this is where Jean Rhys’ short
stories comes in, the undisputed queen of the lonely and the isolated, she was a self-
confessed “perennial outsider” who grew up “alone except for books.” Yet in her books, full of
doomed women in loveless relationships, we are never alone. Her reality becomes our reality
through her writing, and we challenge you not to see even a tiny bit of yourself in one of her
incredible characters.
Most notably in this book of extraordinary stories, we are never made to feel at home in any
one place. No homes are entered in Rhys stories and the settings are limited to ‘a few cafes,
boarding houses and hotels.’ In these external spaces we are all strangers and yet her stories
and characters are so wildly relatable and human. Rhys was born on the sunny Caribbean
island of Dominica before moving to London and Paris and this movement informs much of
the transitory feel of her stories. Much like Lexi whose work also exists transcendent of any
specific space and questions aspects of ourselves as a person and as a member of something
larger. It seems extra exciting that we will be posting these books across the world to all of
you that found Sendb00ks through Instagram and online, and this important conversation
around a global and nonphysical community is a subject we are inspired to be a part of and
can’t wait to explore with you all.
From the original essay sent to subscribers.