Anouska Samms

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

“For all history is the history of waste, of what was left behind, excreted, discarded or lost.” - Tom Chivers Anouska Samms’ practice incorporates sculptures, tapestries and moving image work, provoking conversations around matrilineal memory, waste and women’s bodies in relation to the domestic. She draws on a breadth of references from British studio pottery, collage, and the abstract painting style associated with the Art Informel movement of the 1950s, embracing a contemporary take on the painterly properties of tapestry. Samms takes the mechanisms and aesthetics of traditional crafts as inspiration, yet through her embrace of gesture, new hybrid structures are proposed, creating an interplay between design, craft and fine art. In combining these influences she reflects on how the psyche simultaneously informs, and is informed by, the outer domestic space of the home. Samms rarely views her pieces as individual artworks, but believes they exist together as an ever growing mise-en-scène or assemblage. Reclaiming leftover materials from both her own practice and from donations of goods from peers, fractured ceramics and offcuts can be found within her functional lighting and particularly her vessels - or as she calls them - ‘rots’. Working with synchronicities and accidents, nothing is discarded within her practice. This animates an experimentation with structure and functionality, and a sense of regret when a material’s inherent value is not fully realised....

Artwork