Jeremy Smith

Jeremy W. Smith is a Sydney-based queer artist, curator, and researcher whose practice weaves together drawing, cartography, and queer historiography to illuminate hidden narratives and reimagine how identity is mapped across time, space, body, and mind. He is currently completing a PhD in Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design, where his research project, Drawing Queer Counter-Cartography, unfolds as a series of large-scale, hand-drawn maps that construct a profoundly personal and politically charged visual archive of queer life in Sydney. Smith is also one of the inaugural curators at Qtopia Sydney, Australia’s first LGBTQIA+ museum, and a founding member and curator at DrawSpace, Sydney’s first gallery dedicated to drawing.

Over the past decade, Smith has developed a distinctive visual language that positions drawing not only as a formal medium but as a radical methodology that merges autobiography, community memory, and critical research. His works operate as counter-maps: intricate, symbolic landscapes that challenge hegemonic systems of representation and trace the embodied, psychological, and spatial contours of queer existence. Each map functions as both a visual essay and an act of cultural repair, reclaiming marginalised stories and asserting queer presence across historical and imagined geographies.

Smith’s major works span from early autobiographical explorations to expansive mappings of collective queer experience. These include:

• Mappa Mundi (2012), a foundational map of his personal cosmology
• Legoland (2012), a cartographic reflection on childhood
• Ms Bloomsby (2013), a psychogeographic stream-of-consciousness map of a fictional alter ego
• Saint Sebastian (2014), mapping the queer-coded language Polari onto a 16th-century anatomical body
• Gay Map of Sydney (2019), a visual reorientation of the city through gay male experience
• Gay Man Map (2021), a psychological portrait of the gay male interior world
• Queer Sydney: A History (2022), a chronological scroll mapping resistance and resilience
• Pharmacological Body: AIDS/PrEP Map (2023), charting the shifting terrain of sexual health and liberation
• Queer Elements (2023), a periodic table of queer terminology and community-coded language
• Counter-map of Global LGBTQIA+ Rights (2025), a geopolitical atlas of queer rights and repression
• Gaybourhood Bubbles of Sydney (2023–2025), mapping the cultural and political differences between Sydney’s two main queer enclaves

Smith’s work has been exhibited widely and collected by major institutions including the State Library of New South Wales, Qtopia Sydney, the Australian National Maritime Museum, and the University of Sydney. His solo exhibitions have received critical acclaim for their intellectual depth, emotional resonance, and intricate visual detail.

Beyond the studio, Smith is an active curator, arts writer, and community advocate. His curatorial practice spanning exhibitions such as Queer Drawing, We’re Here, We’re Queer, and Detail extends his cartographic impulse into the gallery space, where he creates platforms for queer voices and experimental drawing practices. His published writings further position drawing as a site of cultural resistance, intimacy, and queer knowledge-making.