Statement by Sam Lock
August 2009
I studied for an MA in Fine Art specialising in Painting and History of Art at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1997. Living in Edinburgh gives you an all-pervading sense of history and awareness that you are merely the latest layer; it is a city of hidden stories that seem to whisper to you and dark corners full of lost information. It has an identity that is both dark and beautiful, playful and sober, wild and solid; the duplicity of the city makes it hard to define, forcing you to live in the margins, the spaces in-between. Since leaving Edinburgh, my practice has been a pursuit of a visual language that explores this dichotomy; I have tried to find a tone of voice for my paintings that tells yet conceals, imagery that is both inviting and elusive, physical yet spatial, open and closed, warm yet melancholic.
My paintings are accumulations of materials and decisions; artefacts of thinking and doing, an attempt to locate poetry in the relationships, combinations and interactions between materials and physical elements. These paintings are informed by natural process, explorations of geography/archaeology, physicality, cause and effect. Their intent is to create space and surface that snags, tangles and holds the viewer. My work aims to explore, express and animate the painted space – alternating between freedom and expanse and the constricted and dense - like forest and sky.
My aim is to create an emotional sense of space and place, where time ravages, wind blows, seas swell, places are found, days dwindle, moments are present then past.