Samantha Clark is a visual artist and writer based in the Orkney Islands. Shaped by Orkney’s weather, expansive skies and, above all, water, her recent paintings invite us to notice how water in its many forms permeates everything, as we inhabit a world in constant motion. Originally trained as a tapestry weaver, her thirty-year practice has moved through drawing, installation, video and public commissions, with painting now at the centre of her work. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art, the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts and the Slade, and holds both an MA in Environmental Philosophy and a PhD in Creative Writing. In 2019, she completed a 30-metre mural for The Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall. Her first book, The Clearing, was published by Little, Brown in 2020, and in 2023 she received the inaugural RSA MacRobert Trust Art Award for Painting.
In her Orkney studio, Clark finds refuge in the quiet rhythm of painting. Her practice centres on being fully present to the unfolding moment: the surface, the paint, and the gradual emergence of form. Working instinctively, she allows each painting to evolve slowly, discovering a different sense of time through the accumulation of marks and gestures. The repetitive, meditative process becomes a way of holding the complexity of the world without seeking to explain or resolve it.
Clark’s paintings exist in direct conversation with the land, water and wind of the Northern Isles. They open outward into the landscape while simultaneously reflecting an interior world, tracing a delicate balance between joy and loss, stillness and motion. Attentive to both beauty and uncertainty, her work searches for moments of calm within the instability of contemporary life. Painting becomes a form of quiet momentum, an ongoing act of attention carried forward into an unknowable future.
Samantha Clark will the be the subject of a major solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in October 2027.
