Author and visual artist Amalie Smith

TERRACOTTA is a book on the connections between clay and life. About the human urge to create life, artificially and biologically. To shape things and dissolve. To retell the world from the beginning.
Why are the clay figures at the Archaelogical Museum in the capital of Cyprus, Nicosia, so alive? What is life anyway, how did it arise on a barren planet? And how will it continue?
TERRACOTTA (2025)
Notes, texts, conversations
192 pages, tête-bêche
Published by Danish Gyldendal
on January 10, 2025
Cover design and typesetting:
Laura Silke, Stanza
The press wrote:
"I know few like Amalie Smith, who can span the entire arc from science to poetry, from the geopolitical to the personal, from substance to design in a way that makes you think this is the only meaningful way to examine the big pressing questions."
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ — Politiken
"Brain-shattering (...) One of our most original thinkers is out with a dizzying investigation of the origin of life. (...) As always, Amalie Smith's thoughts go dizzyingly high, while remaining astonishingly close and grounded."
★★★★★ — Kristeligt Dagblad
"Smith's maturity suits the texts well and at the same time rubs off on the scientific descriptions and discussions of society's and the world's major problems, which in Terra Cotta have acquired a depth and complexity that really gets the brain cells going."
— Atlas Magazine