Hannelore Smith
Hannelore Smith is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator based in North Norfolk, whose practice spans textile design, fine art and educational leadership. Her creative work draws on her cultural heritage, industrial architecture and the natural environment. Through material processes, she explores how the intangible can be made, mapped and traced.
She undertook a Foundation Diploma in Art & Design at Norwich School of Art & Design in 1998-1999 and a BA in Textile Design at Chelsea College of Art & Design in 2002, which led her through a career in freelance design before she shifted to fine art.
Alongside her studio practice she has a long standing commitment to creative education, she is an experienced arts educator and creative project manager, dedicated to making art accessible, engaging, and transformative for people of all ages and backgrounds. In 2011 she co-founded Artpocket, an independent art school in Norwich, where she served as Director until 2024. She is Creative Producer of Artsmiths, a nomadic studio, bringing imaginative creative projects to schools, organisations, festivals and events.
Over the past eight years Hannelore has developed a body of work situated within museums and heritage contexts. As an Associate Artist for the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, she has worked on a range of collaborative educational projects, and she has partnered with galleries, museums, festivals and cultural organisations across the UK to design and deliver bespoke creative projects that promote meaningful engagement with the arts.
Her 2026 exhibitions include WIGHTON26: Undercurrent at All Saints Church in Wighton, where she was awarded the The Alfred Cohen Art Prize. In 2026 she was selected to undertake creative residencies at Cromer Artspace and The Cambridge Room.
Artist Statement
My current work explores invisible signals and flows of data - satellites, radio waves, radar, ciphers and coded systems - through an investigation into WWII coastal defence architecture.
Living on the North Norfolk coast, I am particularly interested in the region as both a historical first line of defence and a site of transmission, where land, sea, and sky converge as channels for signals. Coastal bunkers and defence structures, designed to observe and listen, once operated within wider communication networks, monitoring sea and sky for potential threat. Now weathered and partially eroded, they remain embedded in the landscape as physical traces of these unseen systems.
Through this work, I explore technological "noise" within the landscape, combining plaster casting, hand carving, and laser etching on block forms. The casts capture traces of time and surface texture, suggesting interference, signal loss, and disruption.
I am interested in how these systems continue to resonate: how signals extend beyond their point of origin, and how structures designed for surveillance persist as silent witnesses. Through plaster casting, I seek to capture both the visible and the unseen - the scars of human intervention and the lingering presence of spaces shaped by control and communication.