Sally Smith has a degree and a successful career in architecture, and so one should not be surprised to find within her art a major play of vertical and horizontal lines.  But only a simple artist or architect would be locked in to an unremittingly straightforward use of such essential components; Smith is not so simple.  Similarly, Smith employs a mixture of her English colonial heritage and her husband's Maori ethnicity in her artistic creations, yielding something with both clear foundations and unexpected results.  In her watercolors and ink drawings one sometimes gets the feeling of beholding aboriginal iconography rendered in the style of 17th-century Occidental cartography.  It is a marriage of the "old" and "new" worlds in which there are no Imperialistic clashes, just a peaceful synthesis of culture and style.

Smith resides on Waiheke, a small New Zealand island.  She regularly exhibits in group shows, as well as being featured in an annual solo show that sells out each year.