accompanying book by the same name. Along with private collections, they are also in the public collections of the Oakland Museum of California, Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design, The Smithsonian American Art Museum - Renwick Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Mobilia Gallery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, presently carries her artworks, but Smith's pieces are often part of other gallery or group exhibitions, such as the Cheongju International Craft Biennale 2003, showing in Seoul, Korea.

As a third generation Californian, her geographical history stretches from the Forestville, Guernevile and Sebastopol agricultural communities to the north of San Francisco, where Smith's relatives first moved into the state in the nineteenth century, to the Mexican border, during the years she was an undergraduate and graduate student at the California State University, San Diego campus. She earned her Master of Fine Arts at the California State University, Long Beach campus, in 1983. Except for relatively brief periods spent teaching in Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas, Smith has lived and worked in California, a landscape she knows intimately either through the transmitting of family memory or from personal experience.

Christina Smith's jewelry and her tea services (now totaling four) are a testament to the quality of silver to continue to reveal an artist's ability to make powerful statements. It would be inconceivable to envision them in any other metal. The silkenly smooth silver, with its sometimes rough touches of roller printing for texture, seems to reinforce and ensure the sense of quietude and isolation in her art Here the psychological push me, pull me effect is best divined. The reasons, she says, smiling, "are because there are certain things that you are supposed to be doing; there are certain things you want to be doing; and then there are certain things that you are doing. And they are all operating in the same vicinity, because they are you."

There is a price to be paid in eighteen hour work days. It is formidable for anyone, but especially for a female, to be so focused and single-minded, to carry on one's own work and develop it to the exclusion of other considerations. To do so requires a certain kind of journey that can only be traveled within the confines of the studio life and landscape. This is where Christina Smith makes her finely rendered, solidly crafted and elegantly understated narratives; otherwise, if she did not, her exceptionally delivered ironies for the soul would not be available to inspire us to reconsider our own traditional assumptions.