Unfolding (Stubborn Pigmentation) - Sam Hodge

I will be showing prints from unfolded cardboard packaging extracted from my recycling bin, using pigments made with earths gathered from eroding coastal cliffs. These earths are deposits laid down in previous geological eras and now exposed by the action of the sea on the English coast. The coastline is a border that defines the country, but it is also a place constantly changing from tide to tide and shifting over years, where human efforts to build, control and defend, but also the power of water and weather to transform are both very apparent. In these prints, earthy traces of human-made structures overlap and repeat, their borders becoming less certain and the emerging forms open to interpretation.

I get a lot of my ideas on walks through coastal or urban landscapes. Looking at the patterns, colours and shapes made by material processes and at interactions of these processes with human-made objects and structures. I pick up a lot of things; stones and earth, scraps of plastic, bits of rusty metal, bones and take them back to my studio. Some of the materials I gather are ground or boiled into pigments and inks that make their way into my prints and paintings, connecting the work directly with the environments I have walked through. Using printmaking processes I make impressions of disintegrating scraps of human- made debris that have been transformed so that their function is no longer apparent or simply encourage my materials to make their own mark, watching complex patterns that resemble biological or geological systems emerge in paint as it moves and changes in response to physical forces like pressure, gravity or evaporation.

I am interested in the transformation of materials over time, in what materials can do and what stories they tell. One thing turns into another as ambiguous patterns and forms emerge from physical processes and as our human imagination makes something out of them.

The uncertain edges of England, where land and sea meet, are a fruitful source of both inspiration and found objects for me. I was born and bought up on the south coast of Kent and am engaged in a project to walk the coast of England and Wales and this has given me an appreciation of both the daily changes bought by each tide and the changes wrought by geological forces through deep time. This inspires my work with materials to see what forms and patterns emerge in my studio or in human made objects as they are distorted and transformed by contact with their environment.

I have a studio in Chisenhale Art Place in East London. This is where I bring back materials from my walks and where I prepare my pigments by smashing and grinding them to dust in a pestle and mortar and mixing them with medium with a muller on a glass slab. I store a lot of found objects such as beach plastic or piles of unfolded cardboard boxes here, while I work out what to do with them. I also use the space to make my paintings; often working on the floor and pouring, swishing or squashing paint and then watching it dry.

I do my printmaking at East London Printmakers. I use a wide range of printing processes, such as photopolymer, drypoint, carborundum and etching to transfer the forms of found objects onto paper. The packaging prints in ‘Uncertain Edges’ are direct impressions, made by rolling my handmade earth inks onto the unfolded boxes and running them through a press with damp paper to transfer their impression onto the paper.