LSG presents

Sam Lock


Presence of Absence

For all enquiries please contact LSG

+44(0) 1872 275757     [email protected]


Presence of Absence publication

£15 inc p&p

In her collection Cadaver Speak, poet Marianne Boruch, tries to use words to enter death, to dissect its power and relentless ordinariness by watching medical students learn through practice in an anatomy class.

By both having a body and being a body, we are constantly negotiating the idea of aftermath: how to comprehend running out of body with the only tools we have: the brain in a body that can never experience beyond life’s limits. This moral ambiguity of human consciousness is explored in the poignant and quietly assertive paintings of Sam Lock. They move between amorphous grounds of often monocoloured, worked surfaces, to decisive mark-making that marks the moment in time and yet beyond time, conjured by the immediacy of drawing. As poet MTC Cronin puts it:

‘Listening to everything and hearing myself. Eternity with time taken out of it.’ (1)

What Lock refers to as the ‘fullness and emptiness of intuitive decisions’ comes across as an elegant invitation to mystery in ‘Presence and Absence’, (2019). Here, melancholy is insouciant, even bordering on contentment, caught in the…

Find out more
Sam Lock
View publication
View exhibition thumbnails

Exhibiting from 15th June to 11th July 2020.