Shaped by Orkney’s dynamic natural environment of wind, sky and particularly water, Samantha Clark’s paintings invite us to notice how water permeates everything: sea, lake, stream, cloud, rain, fog, tears, sweat, piss, breath, blood and bone; as we inhabit a liquid reality that interpenetrates our own bodies and minds.
In contrast to water’s quick mutability yet aligned to its drip-by-drip persistence, her process is a slow and meditative practice, a patient accretion of simple marks and translucent, layered washes that results in intricate forms resembling sea foam, cloud formations or rippling waves. These complex patterns emerge from an iterative process akin to the self-generating growth of natural structures.
The water-based paint she uses is as liquid as her subject: it drips, splashes, flows, evaporates and spills in unpredictable ways. Reflective and iridescent media such as mica, metal leaf and chrome ink create surfaces that change with each shift of light, as water does, in a visual play between surface and depth that responds to the viewer’s movements.
Mark-making takes the moment of the hand’s movement or a falling drop, and holds it still, recorded in the mark that remains. A painting is a receptacle of time, a net that gathers up these moments so they are visible in a single instant that shows the timespan of the artwork’s own making.
This invites a recalibration in the viewer, towards slowness, stillness and attentiveness, proposing these as a means to connect us more deeply to our own awareness and our place, and to sensitise us to the water-borne web of kinship and interdependency that supports us.
The support of the RSA MacRobert Art Award for Painting has allowed Sam to develop larger scale works on aluminium panel. These have begun to move away from a semi-representational approach, towards increasingly complex layers of webs and tessellations that transcend the original subject matter.
These works are less about how water looks than what it might mean, expanding outwards from the specifics of one place to engage with more universal questions of selfhood and connectedness. An inquiry into how we are immersed in the mutable element of water is becoming a means to explore edgelessness, diffusion of self, and the mystery of how we live in and through time.
