The Listener 1 2018, Pigment Ink, Gesso and Graphite on Plywood © the artist

This display of drawings and paintings by Samantha Clark celebrates the book The Clearing, a memoir about ‘spaces between’ and what may be learned in them.

In 2011 Samantha Clark returned to Glasgow to clear the family home after the death of her parents. Moving from room to room, sifting through the clutter of belongings, she reflected on her family’s flawed strategies for coping with her mother’s mental illness and her father’s retreat to the world of amateur radio and model planes. Threaded through with insights drawn from classical and scientific ways of understanding empty space, the subtle ether, light, electromagnetism, radio waves, dark matter, and from the contemplative space offered by art, The Clearing considers what we must do with the things we cannot know.

Samantha Clark originally studied at Edinburgh College of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL). She has taught at Edinburgh College of Art, Tasmanian School of Art at Hobart, and was Reader in Art at the University of the West of Scotland. She has an MA in Values and Environment from the University of Central Lancashire and gained a doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews in 2017. She currently teaches at the University of the Highlands and Islands and online for the University of Hertfordshire, and lives in Orkney.