Every Contact Leaves a Trace is the founding principle of forensic science that whenever two things come into contact, an exchange takes place. Matter tells tales, calling into question borders between things and the separation of humans from their environment.
Over 325 years, the varied inhabitants of 195 Mare Street have left their traces on the fabric of the building, leaving it a beautiful, but battered patchwork. Within this patchwork, Sam Hodge will be placing prints and paintings that have emerged from her encounters with things found at the uncertain edges of England, the Thames shore, her own recycling bin and the old house itself.
Walking along the coast path, Sam Hodge has left traces of her shoe soles, clothes fibres and a front tooth fragment (amongst other things) and has extracted a few things that caught her eye and brought them back to her studio. Coal pebbles, washed up on the Thames shore, those fossilised chunks of carboniferous forest, bought to fuel industrial London and dropped into the Thames while being unloaded from ship to dock; Ochres from eroding Devon cliffs formed from sediments settling in Permian deserts or deposited by glaciers in the last ice age; Bricks from the demolished back wall of 195 Mare Street and soot from its chimneys. These have been ground up into pigment and mixed with different mediums to make paint and inks.
Sam Hodge is interested to see what materials can do to make their mark; watching complex patterns that resemble biological or geological systems emerge in paint as it reacts to physical forces like pressure, gravity or evaporation. She selects and sometimes combine these into biomorphic collages.
The things that we throw away also leave their mark on the environment and it on them. They return to haunt us in some form as there is really no such place as ‘away’. Sam Hodge collects discarded human-made objects (such as scraps of beach plastic or cardboard in her recycling bin) that are distorted by contact with the environment so that their original function is no longer apparent. She then transfers their ambiguous and sometimes animate forms onto paper using printmaking processes.
