Sam Hodge

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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

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.  

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.

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..