MEDIUM /// SCULPTURE

Allison Smith, the multidisciplinary artist behind Shakin’ Blues, makes strange little worlds for strange little hearts.

A self-taught sculptor and lifelong storyteller from Rochester, NY, Allison came to sculpture almost by accident. During a difficult season of her life, she discovered an abundance of petrified wood, fossils, and mineral specimens scattered across the landscape outside her home. What she lovingly calls “the summer of rocks” became a creative awakening, inspiring her to create whimsical sculptural companions for the geological treasures she found.

“I always say Mother Earth taught me how to sculpt.”

Allison’s intuitive practice blends sculpture, painting, illustration, fiber, felting, and found-object assemblage. Every Shakin’ Blues sculpture incorporates something recycled, repurposed, or found, reflecting her belief that beauty doesn’t require perfection and that nothing is necessarily finished with its first purpose.

Her creatures are quirky, expressive, and tenderly strange- born from a lifelong fascination with misfits, imagination, nature, symbolism, and storytelling. Without formal training to tell her what she was “supposed” to do, Allison follows curiosity instead, treating unfamiliar techniques as invitations to experiment.

For Allison, art is a way to preserve wonder, make the invisible tangible, and give imagined characters physical form. Shakin’ Blues is ultimately an invitation to stay curious, embrace your weirdness, find beauty in the overlooked, and keep making.