Samantha Jackson
About
Samantha Jackson (b.1999) is an artist from Scotland currently living in London, her practice centres painting, installation and writing. Her work explores interpersonal connections through the use of recycled and found materials, embedding her everyday experiences into painting.
Samantha works primarily with watercolour on found materials, allowing the paint to pool, stain, and sink itself into the surface, creating compositions that reflect the vulnerability and intimacy of daily life. In her current body of work, she treats wood as a living material, incorporating its natural memory and structural properties with paintings of fabric from everyday life. Cloth for Samantha is both contemporaneous to our current culture, consumption and crises and also utterly timeless, folding in and out like the illusionist fabric paintings of the Baroque. In this way she allows the figure and loving gestures to emerge through the architectural nature of folded cloth, painting quiet moments of everyday life. By manipulating reclaimed wood she creates works that resonate with their built environment, often hiding paintings within walls or enmeshing them into the structure of the space.
This year Samantha carried out a series of interventions within the Painting Building. Drawing from spatial critique and Scottish folklore she tucked away painted cloth in ten different locations throughout the studio. She published her findings in The DoDo magazine and On the Bias, a publication between the Royal College of Art in London and Parsons College in Paris.
This approach makes her painting a form of intervention, engaging with and challenging the institutional spaces they exist within. Her painting is an intrinsically feminine, queer expression of everyday life and its intersections with the world beyond the composition of the painted form.
“The Fold” (2024) was constructed from sixty-four blocks of recycled scaffolding board, all joined individually to each other and backed onto a piece of 12mm construction plywood. This painting was then installed directly into the wall, becoming a part of the building itself.
Samantha graduated with first class honours in Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art in 2023, and is the recipient of the Jon Mcfarland Prize for printmaking.
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