workinprogress is a performance company founded by visual artist and performance-maker Terry Smith with Clare Fitzpatrick emerging from his extensive practice in contemporary visual art and architectural interventions. Smith’s earlier installations dismantled and reconfigured buildings—cutting walls, altering spaces—to create site-specific artworks.

This foundational modus operandi now informs his performance work, treating movement as action and spatial exploration rather than spectacle. workinprogress embraces minimalism—sound, silence, breath, presence—and immersive performance formats that invite deeper audience engagement.

Selected Featured Projects:

• Foundlings (Venice, 2014)
  Presented during The International Performance Art Festival, this performance investigates themes of the hidden, loss, and childhood—paying homage to historic institutions dedicated to vulnerable children. Presented in-the-round with musicians, dancers, and dual video screens.

• Combine (London, V22 Peckham, 2012)
  A collaborative, site-specific project comprising eight dancers, three singers, live and recorded music, and five large-scale video projections. The audience moves freely throughout the space, following the action—a fluid, immersive experience built on architectural awareness and movement.

• Mirror Mirror (Quarterhouse, Folkestone, 2021)
  Ensemble performance conceived and developed with a group of performers improvising through rehearsals. Delivered as a unique iteration, it draws from the collaborative authorship of each artist. workinprogress

• Mirror 2 (Whitechapel Gallery, 24 October 2023)
  An exploration of human isolation, repetition, and routine. Performers avoid physical contact and eye interaction, evoking ghostlike parallel existences—all underscored by the sound of John Cage’s Two6 and movement inspired by pioneers such as Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham.

• Shadows (Quarterhouse, Folkestone)
  A site-specific collaboration with composer and performer Randolph Matthews, combining personal histories and found building-specific sounds—such as a malfunctioning bar machine—to address themes like fragmentation, memory, decolonisation, and anonymity through performance.

These projects—combining architectural intervention, performance, sound, and movement—embody the core of Smith’s interdisciplinary, spatially driven practice. workinprogress continues to blur boundaries between visual art and performance, forging raw, intimate experiences that challenge perception, expand accessibility, and invite audiences to connect with dance in its most elemental form.

2025 The Chair Quarterhouse Wavelengths Dance Festival, Folkestone

2024 The Chair The Place, London

2023 Mirror2 Whitechapel Gallery

2021 Shadows Quarterhouse Folkestone (December)

2021 Mirror Mirror Quarterhouse Folkestone (September)

2015 Site Unseen. ICA London

2014 Foundlings at Ca' Pesaro Museo Internazionale d'Arte Moderna, Venice

2014 Foundlings at HuntKasner Gallery, Prague

2014 Foundlings London Art Fair in association with the Eagle Gallery

2014 Unsung, performance Rich Mix London

2014 Open Tromsø Norway, performance lecture

2012 Unsung Music project, Medieval Hall Dartington

2012 Combine V22, London

2011 Broken Voices Caracas La Estancia, Caracas Hola. Sabana Grande, Caracas

2011 Caracol, Caracas

2010 STRING various locations Caracas

2009 Broken Voices Louise T Blouin Institute

2009 Hide and Seek. The Foundling Museum, London

2008 Lost And Found Tete a Tete Opera Festival, London

2007 Sticks and Stones Venice Biennial

2007 Broken Voices St Georges Church, Venice

2007 Broken Voices Liverpool. A Foundation

2007 Broken Voices Riverside. tete e Tete Opera festival (2 Nights)

1996 Staubsauger. Kombirama, Zürich.