Artist’s Statement
Sam Hodge works with print and paint to find out what materials can do and what stories they tell. Through her focus on transformations in matter over time she explores our entanglement with the material world and our reactions to its shifting and unstable nature.
Sam Hodge finds emergent patterns of growth and disintegration in paint and print processes that echo those found in the geological or biological systems. She interacts with the dynamic and generative properties of paint, pouring it onto the support and tipping it so that rivulets erode the paint, pulling it apart to create branching patterns of ridges or allowing the paint to pool and settle, diffuse or crack as it dries. The artist does not regard paintings as static, passive objects, but expects them to continue changing slowly throughout their lifetimes and she is interested in her own and others attitude to ephemerality such as fading in her work. She often makes her own pigments, paints and inks from found materials such as earth, plants and the detritus left by human activity. This connects her work directly to the geological, biological and human stories embodied in the landscapes that she has walked through.
On her urban and coastal walks Sam Hodge is drawn to discarded human-made objects, particularly those that have been metamorphosed by processes of accident or weathering into ambiguous and animated forms. Across a variety of timescales, these objects tell stories of the materials and people that make them and of how materials make humans and their societies. When they are finally thrown ‘away’ they begin an existence of their own, changing and being changed by the environment. Sam Hodge responds to these objects using a mixture of drawing, photographic processes and direct impressions etched and pressed into printing plates (in a manner analogous to fossilisation). In this way she creates images that draw attention to the organic, animate nature of these transforming things.
About The Artist
Sam Hodge lives in East London and works from a studio at Chisenhale Art Place and at East London Printmakers. She studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University before training in painting conservation at The Courtauld Institute and working as a conservator for several years including at Tate. This background has encouraged her interest in materials and how they behave, create and change over time.
Sam Hodge was born and bought up on the Kent coast and is now engaged in a project to walk around the whole coastline of England and Wales, which she is documenting on Instagram. During lockdown, she has been focusing close to home, on the Thames Foreshore. The area where land and sea meet is a fruitful source of both inspiration and found objects for her. It is an edge, a border or skin of the country, what defines it, but also a porous site of exchange and flow, a place constantly in flux, changing from tide to tide and shifting over years. It is a place where human efforts to build, control and defend, but also the power of water and weather to transform are both very apparent.
