My projects begin with lost, weathered things. A waterlogged chair abandoned on the street, an old shirt knotted around a lamp post. These artefacts, rootless yet marked by human touch, hold echoes of a longing for a lost homeland. They become prisms through which I explore my identity as a British Jewish woman. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s call to honour silences, I embrace these fragments as vessels of expression, letting them guide me through a process of deconstructionism, defamiliarization and ultimately, transformation.
They find me, these relics, following me back to the studio—physically, photographically, or tattooed to my memory, where they linger like ghosts of my ancestors. I feel a compulsion to dissect them, to peel back their layers as if revealing the very insides of my own being. To transform them into new sculptures—a relic of a future that feels both nostalgic and untouchable.
I gravitate toward natural, degradable materials—wood, liquid latex, banana skins—so that these artefacts can eventually return to the earth, creating a loop of past, present, and future—a process of putting to rest.
My obsession with probing the self pulls me between sculpture and painting. Pastel, charcoal, and paint become my tools for layering fractured, vulnerable, and violent lines—obsessive marks that trace the outline of my silhouette, shapes which are animalistic and metamorphic in nature.
These works push at the boundaries of colour, mood, figuration, and abstraction, exposing something restless in the in-between—capturing a sense of isolation that has stayed with me since I was in foster care. The sexual prowess I carry as armour collides with the undercurrent of vulnerability I cannot shed—two forces in tension, shaping and reshaping the contours of my identity.
Abi Joy Samuel ...
