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framed dimensions: 93 x 113 cm
Samantha Clark is a visual artist and writer coach based in the Orkney Islands. Shaped by Orkney’s weather, sky 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 as her primary focus today. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art, the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts and the Slade, holds an MA in Environmental Philosophy and a PhD in Creative Writing, and completed a 30-metre mural for The Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall in 2019. Her first book, The Clearing, was published by Little, Brown in 2020, and she received the inaugural RSA MacRobert Trust Art Award for Painting in 2023.
In her Orkney studio, Clark finds a 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 shift and evolve, discovering a different sense of time that deepens with every mark. The slow, repetitive process becomes a way of holding the complexity of the world without seeking to explain or resolve it. Her paintings are in direct conversation with the land, water and wind of the Northern Isles. They open outward into the landscape while reflecting an interior world, tracing a fine balance between joy and loss, stillness, and motion. Clark searches for a kind of peace amid the beauty and uncertainty of modern life; her practice is a quiet momentum that carries forward into an unknowable future.
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