a.samms@live.co.uk
“For all history is the history of waste, of what was left behind, excreted, discarded or lost.” - Tom Chivers
Anouska Samms’ practice incorporates sculptures, tapestries and moving image work, provoking conversations around matrilineal memory, waste and women’s bodies in relation to the domestic. She draws on a breadth of references from British studio pottery, collage, and the abstract painting style associated with the Art Informel movement of the 1950s. Samms takes the mechanisms and aesthetics of traditional crafts as inspiration, yet through her embrace of gesture, new hybrid structures are proposed, creating an interplay between design, craft and fine art. In combining these influences she reflects on how the psyche simultaneously informs, and is informed by, the outer domestic space of the home.
Samms rarely views her pieces as individual artworks, but believes they exist together as an ever growing mise-en-scène or assemblage. Reclaiming leftover materials from both her own practice and from donations of goods from peers, fractured ceramics and offcuts can be found within her functional lighting and particularly her vessels - or as she calls them - ‘rots’. Working with synchronicities and accidents, nothing is discarded within her practice. This animates an experimentation with structure and functionality, influenced by ‘mottainai,’ a Japanese philosophy on waste (the sense of regret when a material ‘goes to waste’, or when its inherent value is not fully realised.) Consequently, perceived ‘failures’ - breakages in the kiln, unintentional rips in her handwoven textiles - are reimagined as deconstructions of traditional forms.
Through this aesthetic approach Samms alludes to the constant negotiation artists make with their own time and productivity, the social relations and conditions that sustain the artist’s own internal and external environments (the majority of Samms works have been created in her bedroom), and the consequences that these have on the final materials used; due to availability of access, knowledge and skills. Typically a red textured clay body is used within her ‘rots’, as the impression of Samms’ fingers are imprinted on the surface by movements of punching, pinching, scratching and fracturing. Referring to the complex relationships between women’s bodies and domestic function, this signifies the multiple ways women both extend and fragment themselves to provide ‘Affective’ labour - positively creating or changing the emotional experiences of others.
Sourced from strangers and family, tufts of hair can be found in almost every piece, hinting at the human actors involved in creating the space of the domestic, the leftover debris that can be found swept into the corners of homes along with the dust. One particular preoccupation is the different ways intergenerational knowledge is passed down, and the ways individual memories and habits become entwined within one household through both social reproduction and the body. Hair is a physical representation of these concerns, as the mitochondrial DNA which is found within the hair shaft is passed down specifically to a child from their mother or pregnant parent. The hair holds knowledge in its very form.