Brittany Walker Smith’s practice is grounded in the idea that pleasure and excess are often dismissed within systems that prioritise productivity and seriousness. In response, she reclaims fantasy as a legitimate space of thought and feeling — one that sits deliberately outside the greyness of everyday working life. Through this lens, enjoyment becomes not a distraction, but a mode of survival.

The work also considers how femininity is shaped by expectations around behaviour, visibility and emotional labour. Walker Smith reflects on how women’s engagement with fantasy, ornament and pleasure is frequently read as excessive or unserious, and instead reframes these gestures as deeply political acts of self-definition.

Across the work, self-portraiture becomes a site of play and construction, where identity is not fixed but performed through layered visual and psychological states. Fantasy is not an escape from reality, but a way of reorganising it.