We continue our series of Artist Profiles as we talk to Birsay based artist Samantha Clark. Here’s what she had to say about her background, her own work and how Orkney has inspired her since moving to the islands four years ago.

I originally trained in Tapestry at Edinburgh College of Art and did a postgraduate in Printmaking the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Much later I did an MA in environmental philosophy by distance learning with University of Central Lancashire and completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews in 2017. I now live in Birsay, where I have my studio.

Inside Samantha’s Birsay Studio. Image © Samantha Clark

Living in Orkney for the last four years I have become fascinated and inspired by the way the natural environment is being constantly and dynamically shaped by the movements of water in its many forms: sea, rain, snow, haar, cloud, loch, burn, wetland, ditch, puddle, and by the movements of sunlight over and through it. I have recently been developing a body of work that contemplates this endless motion through a slow, repetitive drawing process, an attempt to capture water, drop by drop. There is something meditative about the contrast between the stillness and patience required by this drawing process and the ephemerality of the subject matter. It feels more important than ever, in these days, to pay attention to the everyday beauty of things like sunlight sparkling off wind-blown water, rain on the sea, a haar rolling in. To notice and celebrate this beauty feels like a small but necessary act of resistance to all the darkness gathering around us at the moment.

‘White Water’, Gesso, Gouache and pigment ink on cradled board © the artist

‘Dispersal’ Gesso, Gouache, Tea and pigment ink on cradled board © the artist

Over the years I have worked in many different media, from video, installation, sculpture, photography and also writing. A constant thread running through this has been the practice of drawing. To me, drawing always feels like coming home. The activity of drawing feels like a space in which I can let ideas unfold and develop at their own pace, as I hold them loosely in my attention, without forcing a particular outcome. Since moving into my lovely studio here in Birsay I’ve been able to explore drawing more extensively and begin to make paintings too.

‘Droplets’ Gesso, Gouache and pigment ink on cradled board © the artist

‘Floating Edges’ Gesso, Gouache and pigment ink on cradled board © the artist

‘Foam’ Gesso, Gouache and pigment ink on cradled board © the artist

I’m a writer as well as a visual artist so words are important to me, and that goes for titles too. I often think a title is a bit like a key. A good title can open up the work for the viewer and suggest a way they might look at something without being too prescriptive. But I often tend to work in series, so sometimes I give the series a title and the works within it just have to make do with a plain old number!

Samantha atwork in the studio Image credit Michael Wolchover — Samantha atwork in the studio
Image credit Michael Wolchover

Any advice to other artists?

To artists who are starting out down the path I’d say make friends with your art practice. Cultivate this friendship by doing/drawing/making/writing something every day, without any expectation but in an open, interested, friendly way. Build a solid lifelong creative habit. It will serve you well in so many unanticipated ways.

How are you coping with the current situation?

I am really fortunate to have my studio at home. I know many artists who haven’t had access to their work-space which must be really hard. So I have been able to continue to make new work and I am more grateful than ever that creativity is such an intrinsic part of my life. But I had two exhibitions cancelled or closed at short notice, and I also had my first book published just before the lockdown, so a diary full of publicity events and book festivals were all cancelled, which was quite a blow at the time. I’m engaging much more with social media as a way to maintain and build connections. To view this positively, the move towards more use of digital channels serves to erase geography, which to some extent levels the field for artists who are, like myself, based far from urban centres of population. We now have just as much access to audiences and current exhibitions as anyone else.