Marie Louise Jones
Lock (b.1973) studied at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University, graduating in 1997 with MA’s in both Fine Art and Art History.
He won a scholarship to travel to Rome in 1995, where he explored the relationship between history, archaeology, and the processes of painting. This preoccupation continues to inform the conceptual basis that underpins his practice. Change is a process, not an event; there is a continual flow and movement around us and in us. Locks paintings are created in this space, and the way they communicate relies upon it. Lock’s paintings don’t rely on a system or fixed process but through an energy that is built on Change and Chance, organic and unscripted. Each painting, sculpture, or space follows its own path until there is a balance between presence and absence; where there are silences and hiding places that are both poetic and activating.
Inside Sam Lock’s most recent body of work, he continues to explore the ambiguities of the human consciousness. But this master of ironic detachment has turned up the heat. During my last visit to Lock’s studio, I noticed something different about him and his work. Coolness continues to apply but his work has a renewed sense of being, a burning spontaneity, a complete immersion in the “all or nothing”.
Lock is interested in things that communicate both instantly and slowly; how to slow down the viewer’s perception, to create forms that don’t reveal themselves fully, all at once, that have complexity, hooks and clues. The act of practice is for him, a filling up and emptying of space and surface; traces and echoes exist in a palimpsest, a build-up of painted marks, layers and statements that conceal and reveal, where time becomes held in a concrete way, the painting achieving a physical weight and substance. These layers invite you to move in and out of the painting and lead us back in time. This is not a romantic or nostalgic notion though; Locks paintings retain a mystery and a dynamism of the moment rather than the mists of yesterday.
His book covers, like painterly novels, radiate charm, uniting two strangers: the artist and the onlooker.
“The World We Live In” sparks an unplanned journey through a painted space. Each painting creates a situation that looks to hold the gaze, creating a sense of space in between the viewer and itself. This liminal space echoes his fascination with the dramatic silences deployed by Pinter, or the overlapping of the past and the present found in Beckett plays or prose. Often below the word that is spoken is the thing known and unspoken and it is this ambiguous territory that Lock is drawn to; to try and find that language in painting where underneath what is said, another thing is being said or suggested. These principles of uncertainty, where all is in flux, where imagination is key, give his work its metaphysical sense; of travelling without destination, roads to nowhere or anywhere.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem.
Walt Whitman, “To You”
PUBLICATION: The World We Live In
£20 inc p&p