a.samms@live.co.uk
Purchase work through Gertrude
Anouska Samms’ practice incorporates sculptures, large-scale tapestries and moving image. Her work provokes conversations around mimicry, hapticity as sensorial communication, deconstruction and the domestic.
Exploring the inherent properties of the materials themselves, Samms’ harmoniously combines distinct modes of making. Negotiating the languages of painting, textiles and ceramics, she draws on a breadth of references from contemporary fashion, the 1970s British New Ceramics movement, and the abstraction of Art Informel 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; animating an experimentation with structure and functionality. Consequently Samms’ creates a contemporary interplay between design, craft and fine art.
Samms visually communicates mimicry and mimesis, exploring the interconnectedness of imitation with the repetitive patterns and processes of weaving and textiles. Here Samms’ ‘material mimicry’ serves as a metaphor for yielding to one’s environment, whether that be the external, the domestic, or the internal psyche. Mimicry is not exclusively practiced by animals. From social behaviour to fashion and material culture, humans too imitate resemblances for survival. Through Samms’ use of assemblage and her consistent motifs of hues and textures, she explores the ways emotional experiences can be disguised in culture through surface and aesthetic representation. Through Samms’ continual deconstruction of her handwoven silk and hair textiles, to her fractured ceramic shards, she visually explores the gooey rupturing underneath a protective layer.
Not only do materials migrate and crosspollinate between works, with the ‘leftovers’ of one piece finding its way into another, but her ‘material mimicry’ extends itself to an imitation of both surface and process. Sometimes one material will become a mirror of a different type of material altogether, where textures such as wood are mimicked using jesmonite, clay, coloured pencils or painstakingly woven using minute silk threads. There is a transparency to this process of disguise, as these materials allow the viewer to see both - what they are, and what they appear to be.
Alternatively, seemingly disparate materials are paired yet united by their shared gestural processes, despite their technical incompatibility. With her sculptural lights or ‘Rot’ vessels, Samms’ not only uses traditional glazes that are designed to fuse with the ceramic, but she also incorporates her own combination of alternatives to colour her work, such as oil pastel, oil paint, resin and sand. While these may not possess the same technical durability as traditional glaze, this oil based materiality both mimics and evokes the memory of the artist’s muddy engagement with the wet clay itself - a tangible memory of the soft fine-grained earth before the vitrification process (firing) where it is hardened into ceramic. Unlike ceramic glaze, the pastels and paint do not need to be fired in order to melt and bind, allowing for the artist to engage with an immediacy within the work - a nod to gestural abstraction.
Samms recognises the therapeutic effects of materials on both the artist and viewer, and the significant sensations produced through both of these forms of engagement through what theorist Laura U. Marks terms as ‘haptic visuality.’ This is a specific way of seeing, one that evokes an imagined experience of touch. Primarily concerned with recreating certain emotions symbolically through textures, Samms’ produces multi-layered works - from pulling out the painterly qualities of her woven tapestries, to the folding and further manipulation of suede offcuts; hand sewn into ceramic. Choosing to regard her work as an ever growing mise-en-scène or assemblage - as opposed to individual artworks - Samms’ fosters a closer proximity between viewer and work, one that is multi-sensory.