In her Camberwell artist studio at Cornerstone Studios, Arizona explores trance states, abstraction and the slow permission of unlearning.

There is something elemental in the work of Arizona Smith. A feeling before it’s a shape. A colour before it’s a character. Whether painted, drawn or formed by hand, her pieces hold the emotional charge of a half-remembered dream, ambiguous but deeply real. Arizona’s art studio at Cornerstone Studios, a creative studio in Camberwell, has become the quiet container for this unfolding work.

She rarely begins with a plan. Instead, she arrives at her Camberwell artist studio, lights a candle, and lets what wants to come through emerge in its own time. “I try to paint from my body rather than my brain,” she says. “It’s less like I’m making something and more like I’m getting out of the way, letting something move through me.”

Arizona’s visual language has long been described as otherworldly, but for her, it’s always been rooted in something internal. “As a kid I made art to process the world. I’d get lost in shape and colour. Later I realised I’d invented a kind of visual language for things I couldn’t say out loud.” This evolved into a symbolic, often illustrative style rich in character and metaphor. Over the past year, her work has shifted again. Figurative forms have dissolved into abstraction, allowing a feeling to hold shape instead. “I’ve been moving away from representation and more into trying to hold or express a feeling itself,” she explains. The process is instinctive and deeply physical, layering, covering, and reworking each piece until it emits the right energy.

This slow, embodied approach echoes her parallel practice as a healer. Arizona’s art studio doubles as a space for ritual and trance work, and the two feed into each other seamlessly. “I feel lucky to live in a way where my practices, my work and my experience of being in the world all feel very connected. Painting in a more abstract way has moved alongside new phases of healing, especially around land. It’s influenced larger paintings, but also sparked jewellery, drawings and ceramics, all part of the same thread.”

Dreams often seed a new painting, though she resists overthinking it. “Sometimes it’s an image, sometimes it’s a feeling. What I’m looking for is the sense of it, the way colour or an expression carries visceral information.” What emerges in her creative studio in Camberwell feels less like a statement and more like a transmission.

Having a dedicated art studio at Cornerstone has shaped this work in subtle but powerful ways. The building’s atmosphere, communal yet private, makes space for the depth and intensity her practice demands. “It’s only been me in the studio for most of the time,” she says, “but having a place to do deep work whilst feeling so held by the wider building has really allowed paintings to come through with ease and speed.” This balance of solitude and support has become integral to her creative process.

There is a quiet generosity in how Arizona speaks about her practice. She isn’t concerned with defining it, but rather with remaining attuned to where it wants to go. Abstraction is not a rejection of earlier work, but an expansion of it, a loosening of form that lets what cannot be spoken move through. Her Camberwell artist studio has become the perfect setting for this unfolding, a space where each layer, mark and gesture can speak for itself.