Exhibitions
Sam Lock 'The Memory of What Comes Next'
Sam Lock’s solo exhibition at Anima Mundi ‘The Memory of What Comes Next’
Sam Lock’s considered and expressive, often large scale, abstract paintings embrace the principle that change is a process, not an event. A meditation on the continual flow and movement both around us and within us inspires each gesture. They are not made with a system or fixed process but through an energy that embraces both flux and chance, in a manner that is both organic and unscripted, following its own path until there is a balance between both presence and absence.
The present is everything, as it is where all of our actions exist, but it has no fixed form – instead shaping itself exactly in the non-existent space between the future and the past. This fleeting and liminal space between yesterday and tomorrow is what I try and grasp with the action of paint.
The shifting sands here can make this transient place feel unstable, but as Edoardo Chillada once said “of all concepts, isn’t stability the most unnatural and contrary to life?”. I find that to focus on this constant moment provides a stimulation of my awareness and my creativity.
All we have is an overlapping of what we hope or dream, all we have known and done, tied up in the constant flux of the now passing through us.
Memory is twofold at least, acting both as an archive of experience but it is also constructive – editing, adapting and connecting our beliefs, intentions, experiences and obligations across time. Our lives are punctuated by a palimpsest of memory traces, preserved episodes and encounters that we look back upon time and again; but the significance and interpretations of these traces shifts with us as we change with time, making memory fluid and a living part of us, rather than merely living in our past; it provides us with an archaeology of now.
There is a Silvia Plath line from her poem ‘The Colossus’ which reads “I will never get you put together entirely” – which I often use to underpin my paintings. I try to find the point in painting where the works are unstable in some way, with windows and fault lines that undermine them – somewhere before they are complete. Something always remains secret, forgotten, hidden or lost.
The works in this exhibition are connected together like areas on a map, the landscape changes but the search remains the same; a search for the poignancy of moments in the painted act. They are roads to nowhere, and yet anywhere too; the mind fills in the gaps.
There is a poignancy in any moment, it is always someone’s first or last, significant in some way or insignificant after all; either way, moments pass through us or pass us by, a stream of something bigger than ourselves, stripping self-importance. Our memories attach us to these moments and we use them to identify ourselves, to recognise ourselves or to portray ourselves to others.
I am drawn more to a state of not knowing, to have questions rather than answers, to be lost rather than certain and to travel without destination. My paintings are a monument and marker to the ever present, present moment, helping to give a physicality to all that is fleeting.
Sam Lock, 2023
The present is everything, as it is where all of our actions exist, but it has no fixed form – instead shaping itself exactly in the non-existent space between the future and the past. This fleeting and liminal space between yesterday and tomorrow is what I try and grasp with the action of paint.
The shifting sands here can make this transient place feel unstable, but as Edoardo Chillada once said “of all concepts, isn’t stability the most unnatural and contrary to life?”. I find that to focus on this constant moment provides a stimulation of my awareness and my creativity.
All we have is an overlapping of what we hope or dream, all we have known and done, tied up in the constant flux of the now passing through us.
Memory is twofold at least, acting both as an archive of experience but it is also constructive – editing, adapting and connecting our beliefs, intentions, experiences and obligations across time. Our lives are punctuated by a palimpsest of memory traces, preserved episodes and encounters that we look back upon time and again; but the significance and interpretations of these traces shifts with us as we change with time, making memory fluid and a living part of us, rather than merely living in our past; it provides us with an archaeology of now.
There is a Silvia Plath line from her poem ‘The Colossus’ which reads “I will never get you put together entirely” – which I often use to underpin my paintings. I try to find the point in painting where the works are unstable in some way, with windows and fault lines that undermine them – somewhere before they are complete. Something always remains secret, forgotten, hidden or lost.
The works in this exhibition are connected together like areas on a map, the landscape changes but the search remains the same; a search for the poignancy of moments in the painted act. They are roads to nowhere, and yet anywhere too; the mind fills in the gaps.
There is a poignancy in any moment, it is always someone’s first or last, significant in some way or insignificant after all; either way, moments pass through us or pass us by, a stream of something bigger than ourselves, stripping self-importance. Our memories attach us to these moments and we use them to identify ourselves, to recognise ourselves or to portray ourselves to others.
I am drawn more to a state of not knowing, to have questions rather than answers, to be lost rather than certain and to travel without destination. My paintings are a monument and marker to the ever present, present moment, helping to give a physicality to all that is fleeting.
Sam Lock, 2023
