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Terri Smith is a visual artist based in South Galway, Ireland, whose work focuses primarily on detailed ink drawings and vibrant ink paintings. Her practice develops narrative-led bodies of work informed by folklore, place, and observation, exploring how meaning persists around sites, objects, and figures associated with death, witness, and transformation.
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Her work is characterised by careful restraint and accumulation, favouring ambiguity over explanation. Animals, architectural elements, and symbolic figures recur as observers rather than protagonists, allowing narrative tension to emerge gradually rather than through overt storytelling.
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Recent bodies of work include What Persists, an ongoing series examining endurance and aftermath through natural and constructed forms; Myths & Legends, a growing group of ink drawings rooted in folklore and cautionary narratives; and Murgatroyd’s Garden, a completed fictional world developed through image, object, and ritual.
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Alongside her studio practice, Terri studies forensic science as a mature student at Atlantic Technological University in Galway. This perspective informs her approach to looking rather than functioning as subject matter, encouraging attention to residue, structure, and material consequence, and shaping how images are constructed and read.
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Terri’s practice is research-informed and process-led, allowing ideas to develop across sustained bodies of work rather than isolated imagery.
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She has worked extensively as a professional illustrator, creating artwork for more than fifty children’s books, an experience that continues to inform her sensitivity to narrative structure and visual pacing.  She lives and works from her home in South Galway, Ireland.