This series of prints has been printed directly from unfolded cardboard boxes, many of which were collected during Covid lockdown. The ink is handmade with pigments (some of which have been made by the artist from found materials) mixed with relief ink. The artist rolls this ink onto the unfolded boxes and then runs them through an etching press to transfer the ink onto paper, repeating the process with overlapping boxes to build up complex shapes.
Reminiscent of palimpsestic plans of ancient cities, robotic constructions, totemic figures or masks, these prints are a reminder that something unexpected will emerge from the debris of our unbridled consumption.
Relief print form unfolded packaging in ink made with pigments from coal brick and mud from Thames shore and Hackney earth on grey paper; 2024; edition of 3; 100 × 73 cm
Relief print from unfolded packaging in ink made with earth pigment gathered from the Devon coast on grey Somerset paper, 2023, edition of 3, 75 x 54 cm
Relief print from unfolded cardboard boxes in ink made with earth pigments from North Devon, on grey Somerset paper; 2023; edition of 3; 75 × 54 cm
Print made from unfolded cardboard boxes in ink made with earth pigments from Devon coast on grey Somerset paper, edition of 3, 2023, 75 x 54 cm
Relief print from unfolded cardboard boxes in ink made with earths from Devon coast on grey Somerset paper, 2023, edition of 3, 75 × 54cm
Print made directly from unfolded cardboard boxes in ink made with earth pigments from the Devon coast on grey Somerset paper, edition of 3, 2023, 54 x 37 cm
Collagraph print from unfolded packaging (ink made from Thames coal) on Somerset paper, 2021, 114 x 76 cm, Unique print
Collagraph print (ink made from Thames coal) with collage of unfolded packaging on Somerset paper, 2021, 76 x 57 cm
Collagraph print (ink made from Thames coal) with collage of unfolded packaging on Somerset paper, 2021, 76 x 57 cm
Sam Hodge has recently started using foraged materials to make paint. On her walks she collects natural materials such as bark, petals and seed cases, earths and rocks and also pieces of detritus generated by human activity such as metal coins, electrical wiring, Nos cannister’s, bricks or broken plates. She makes these materials into pigments, paints and inks. As they diffuse and separate in drying, the materials make their own landscape of pattern and form closely to the geology, biology and human history of the place they came from.
Lichen and Larch bark inks, yellow earth and burnt sheep bone pigments in gum arabic and acrylic medium, on Arches watercolour paper. Made from pigments gathered while staying at Hartsop in the Lake District January 2020. 56 x 38 cm.
Lichen, willow bark and avocado pip inks with Brick dust and eggshell pigments in gum arabic and acrylic media on Bockingford watercolour paper with Japanese tissue collage. Made during lockdown in East London, 2020, 36 x 28cm
Burnt seaweed and puff ball spores in gum arabic on Bockingford watercolour paper with Japanese tissue collage. Made from things foraged on a walk on the Suffolk coast, Feb 2020, 34 x 28cm
Birch bark ink and brick dust with acrylic medium on Arches paper with tissue collage. 49 x 38 cm, 2020
Pigment extracted from copper wiring found next to the gun emplacement, Symi town beach, on Arches paper, 2020, 75 x 56 cm
These are a series of paintings and collages made with coal picked up from the Thames shore. Slipping and dropped into the river while being unloaded from ship to dock, the coal has been washed up and down with the tides, smoothed into pebbles and sorted by the River into lines on the strand. It was shipped from Newcastle to fuel the homes and industries of London from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, blackening the buildings and the lungs of its inhabitants. Nick-named 'The Big Smoke', London was the first city in the world to be dependent on a fossil fuel.
Thinking about the labour of people who dug, carried, burnt and breathed this coal, Sam Hodge smashes and grinds it into pigment and mixes it with medium. Thinking about the deeper time through which this coal was made from remnants of ancient Carboniferous forests, she drops it into Thames water, letting the coal-paint pool, settle and diffuse on the paper. Dendritic patterns emerge as paint is pulled apart and she combines them to make new biomorphic forms. Coal-grown hybrids.
Coal Tides, 2020, Coal pigment from River Thames at Deptford with gum arabic and casein on Arches paper, 132 x 96 cm
Carboniferous 1, 2020, Pigment from Thames coal in gum arabic on Arches paper with collage of coal+acrylic medium monoprint on Japanese tissue, 35 x 24 cm
Carboniferous 4, 2020, Pigment from Thames coal in gum arabic on Arches paper with collage of coal+acrylic medium monoprint on Japanese tissue, 33 x 27 cm
Carboniferous 6, 2020, Pigment from Thames coal in gum arabic on Arches paper with collage of coal+acrylic medium monoprint on Japanese tissue, 36 x 29 cm
Carboniferous 7, 2021, Pigment from Thames coal in gum arabic on Arches paper with collage of coal+acrylic medium monoprint on Japanese tissue, 36 x 28 cm
Carboniferous 8, 2021, Pigment from Thames coal in gum arabic on Arches paper with collage of coal+acrylic medium monoprint on Japanese tissue, 37 x 29 cm
Dendritic patterns that recall the branching patterns of veins, roots and hyphae are created by squashing and pulling apart acrylic paint and taking a monoprint from the pattern of ridges formed. These complex configurations demonstrate the material agency of paint, endlessly varied patterns emerging from a simple physical process. Sam Hodge plays with a variety of materials using this technique, sometimes using pigments she has made and sometimes encouraging or observing the way the paint continues to behave after the initial painting process is finished. For example In Vibrant Matter her glow-in -the dark installation, the molecules in the paint vibrate with stored energy to emit light and make themselves visible, while in her rust maculae, iron powder reacts with moisture, corroding in unpredictable ways.
Coal dust from coal collected on the Thames shore and acrylic medium monoprint on Japanese Kozo tissue, 2021, 81 x 117 cm
Acrylic medium with rusted iron powder on Somerset paper (newsprint grey), 2020, 50 x 41 cm
Graphite powder and acrylic medium monoprint on Somerset paper (newsprint grey), 2020, 70 x 55 cm
This work is available at a price of £1100
Vibrant matter is a glow-in-the-dark installation made for the group exhibition Whitenoise at St Pancras Crypt in 2017. It consists of monotypes of acrylic medium mixed with luminescent pigments on transparent melinex sheets. These pieces are hung from the ceiling to be walked through and around. Displayed in total darkness, the only light in the room comes from the paint itself. As eyes become accustomed to the dark, more details of these floating, twisting, figure-sized shapes become visible. Seeming at once ghostly and sub-marine.
Collage of acrylic monoprints on coloured paper, 2019, 56 x 47cm
A Griffin Gallery Residency in 2017 gave Sam Hodge the use of a studio, access to the paint technology labs at Colart Headquarters in W11 and some new materials to play with. She observed the formation of drying patterns in watercolour, inks and acrylics and also extended her interaction with the dynamic properties of paint over a longer timescale.
Having trained and worked as a painting conservator, Sam Hodge is well aware that rather than being static, finished objects, paintings continue to change throughout their lives, fading, cracking, yellowing – looking different in different lights and in different company. She wanted to encourage these changes by using fugitive pigments. Concentrating on reds, she did experiments to find out how fast they might fade and made work in which some elements will disappear or change colour over a few months or years in the light, while others stay the same.
Using reds inevitably made the images she produced very biological; something that she began to work with – producing collections of red stains that make reference to natural history collections or histology slides and experimenting with blood as a pigment.
Acrylic medium, watercolour and blow (bovine) on paper, 2017, 75x55cm
Gouache on Arches paper, 2017, 77 x 57cm
Gouache, watercolour and ink on Arches paper, 2017, 77 x 57cm
Work in progress on Vital Matter 2017. Pebbles weight the paper flat, as paint is dropped into a pool of water. A process repeated 30 times with different combinations of pigment, some fugitive and some permanent. some cells will fade, some change colour and some stay stable.
Installation shots of Vital Matter and Forty-nine Red Spots at In Residence exhibition at Griffin Gallery, 2017
Detail of Mutable Matter after exposure to the sun. The bottom half is turning blue as the red pigment fades, the top half will turn red as the blue pigment fades.
Fading tests made in the light -aging unit in the Colart labs to see how quickly some of the pigments will fade.
Pelagic Plastic is a series of photopolymer etchings of translucent scraps of plastic washed up on the beach and collected by the artist on her walk around the coast of England and Wales. These discarded water bottles have been weathered and distorted by wave action to resemble the deep-sea creatures that they are replacing, reminding us of both our power to pollute the ocean and its power over us and our things. Sinking to the bottom of the sea bed, like the coccolith skeletons that made our chalk landscape in ancient oceans, they are future fossils, forming a new Anthropocene stratum.
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 20, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x26 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer print, white ink on black Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
photopolymer etching in white ink on Rives Noir paper, edition of 5, 2019, 49x36 cm (paper size)
A series of intricate drypoint drawings of the crack patterns in shattered glass – windows, doors, iPads and mobile screens. These are traced onto transparent plastic sheets with a sharp needle and then inked and printed like etchings.
Accidental or intentional violence damages glass irreversibly, destroying its smooth, simple transparency and reminding us of the fragility of human-made things. Its sharpness is dangerous and its complexity unwelcome. Because of this, broken glass is often used as a metaphor for the irreversible fracture of a person or society. The process of drawing focuses prolonged even loving attention on these results of a moment of destructive force, while the transformation into print allows an appreciation of the beauty and variety of crack patterns that have emerged; encouraging connections with natural history illustrations.
Sam Hodge started drawing peoples smashed mobile screens during a residency in the Barbican foyer as part of ‘Hack the Barbican’ in 2013. Initially drawn to the beauty and variety of the crack patterns, she soon realised that the stories behind them were just as interesting and individual and began to record and write them down. The rupture produced by an accident prompts people to remember banal details about their everyday lives at that moment, while their effort to make sense of things going wrong in their lives reveals diverse attitudes towards the role of fate in chance events, modern technology, and the impermanence of material objects.
A collection of 39 drypoint drawings and their stories, made over a period of 2 years were combined together in a book; ‘A Catalogue of Misfortune' published in 2015 in a limited edition of 750. The book is litho-printed with a screen printed glow-in-the-dark screen on the cover.
The book was featured by Lucy Davies in the Telegraph arts pages: Lucky Breaks
Drypoint, edition of 5, 2017, 49 x 26 cm (paper size)
Drypoint, edition of 5, 2017, 49 x 26 cm (paper size)
Artist's book, edition of 750, published by Accidental Press 2015, 39 illustrations, litho-printed with a screen-printed glow-in-the-dark cover, 23.5 x 16.5 x 1cm
Artist's book, edition of 750, published by Accidental Press 2015, 39 illustrations, litho-printed with a screen-printed glow-in-the-dark cover, 23.5 x 16.5 x 1cm
Drypoint, edition of 5, 2015, 30 x 21 cm (paper size)
Drypoint, edition of 5, 2014, 30 x 21 cm (paper size)
Drypoint, edition of 5, 2014, 30 x 21cm (paper size)
Drypoint, edition of 5, 2012, 110 x 67cm
In 2013 Sam Hodge was artist in residence at Chisenhale Art Place,. which is housed in a converted factory building from the early 20th Century. Part of the building is derelict with a series of triple height factory windows consisting of 77 panes of glass that have been smashed by generations of kids chucking stones at them. Each pane has been broken on a different occasion and in a different way. This contrasts with repetitive grid structure of the windows, producing something akin to a scientific experiment, or perhaps just the record of a series of unfortunate events.
In response to the site, Sam Hodge made a series of etchings on steel plates of the smashed panes of one of the 5m high windows, each plate the same size as one window pane. These prints were then assembled in Studio 4 at Chisenhale and displayed in an installation with the steel etching plates on the floor at the end of her residency. The start of this project is documented in an a-n artists blog
Because of its 5m height, she had to wait until 2015 for the chance to display the work in one piece, when it was selected for the Creekside Biennial by Richard Deacon and hung at APT Gallery, Deptford. It had a second outing, at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in 2017.
77 etchings assembled into 1 work on paper, artist’s proof, 2013-15, 495 x 210cm. Photo taken of installation at Creekside Biennial, APT Gallery, 2015
End of Residency installation, Studio 4, Chisenhale Artplace, 2013
End of residency installation, Studio 4, Chisenhale Artplace, 2013
End of Residency installation in Studio 4, Chisenhale Artplace, 2013
Using the etching and pressing processes of print, Sam Hodge makes impressions of found objects. Specimens of our material culture discarded on city streets, studio floors and sea strand-lines are transformed using methods analogous to fossilisation into ambiguously organic images.
This series are impressions in soft ground on zinc plates of pieces of fibre-glass discarded by Sam Hodge’s sculptor neighbour on the way to his studio. Initially annoyed by the mess, she began to recognise their powerfully hairy presence, with combinations of torn and cut edges giving each a distinct character and setting up relationships when they are placed together.
Etching, edition of 15, 34.5 x 27.2cm(plate size) 60 x 47 cm (paper size)
Etching, edition of 15, 2012
Etching , edition of 15, 2011, 26.8 x 25cm (plate size) 52 45 cm (paper size)
Etching, edition of 15, 2011
Originating from an earlier series of landscapes of tidal mudflats these paintings are made using the flow of diluent out of oil paint. Lines emerge in the paint where the pigment is washed away to reveal the layers underneath. Paintscapes that retain a feeling of the flow that formed them, evoking other types and scales of landscape also carved by liquid..
Oil on canvas, 2017, 107x122cm
Oil on canvas, 2012, 80 x 105cm
Oil on canvas , 2016,
Oil and acrylic on panel, 2018, 61 x 61cm
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 2018, 40 x 40cm
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 2019, 40 x 40cm