SAMANTHA DAVIES

ARTIST BIO

Samantha Davies is a self taught mixed media artist living in the UK, who left her career as a paediatric nurse in 2022 to pursue her passion as an artist. This bold move somewhat surprised her family and peers however she was unable to ignore the pull of artistic expression that she had found therapeutic as a child.
Samantha has experimented with many creative courses from life drawing and painting to textiles before joining Hastings art school under the tuition of Julia Kotziamani.

It was here that she became frustrated with who she was as an artist and what she wanted to say.
Eventually Samantha removed colour and began to play with textiles and sculpting.

Embracing vulnerability she lays bare her emotions on the floor of her studio creating in a mediative rhythmic dance, large scale sculpted silk art, exploring the creation of monochromatic, timeless art to evoke emotions and conection. The sensory way she works supports grounding awareness in her body and connection that had been missing through periods of dissociation from her past work environments.
Her work reflects her life experiences, the twists and turns of womanhood, trauma and the beauty of change, transmuting experiences into art that embraces imperfections with inspiration from the natural world around her.

She envisions sharing therapeutic art practices with children as a foundation for supporting all aspects of wellbeing from an early age.

ARTIST STATEMENT

"I create from my heart to yours and acknowledge we are all on our own journeys."

Drawing inspiration from personal experiences and reflections on my childhood, my work combines a love of nature and dance, as well as material tactility, to produce large-scale monochromatic abstracts.

Working on the floor of my studio, I merge sculpting and painting, exploring texture in a semi-conscious or meditative state.

My first exhibition “No more silence” explores my personal memories and narratives, dancing into the knots and constricting emotions that I buried inside and hid. The results are monumental silk-sculptures on canvas, where my process has teased out and exposed memories of trauma and personal tragedy.

Art making continues to be a meditative, exploratory act, which I use as an emancipatory tool to fight against the frustrations and restrictions of everyday life and work. I have found a way of capturing my soothing, rhythmic movements through embodied reactive sculpting with rhetorical silk.

With each fold and twist of my medium I expose part of my story and allow for a subtle conversation with the viewer. Sticking to minimal form, and rejecting colour and time in these sculptural works allow me to connect to my materials, body, feelings and other people.