Sam Black is a British-Filipino painter and graduate of Edinburgh College of Art. Her paintings explore the unstable terrain between language and image, the places where meaning fractures, mistranslates, or dissolves altogether. Black investigates how images can be recontextualised through the subconscious with a density of intentions. Drawing from her mixed-race identity she attempts to connect to other people through mythology and devotional iconography.

 

This body of work is inspired by dreaming and unconscious connections, carrying themes of translation and repurposing imagery. Her layered oil paintings are punctuated by text and typography that destabilise the visual language of the paintings, using strange and evocative phrases that can be interpreted as commands, spells or poems etc.  Often combining animal and human imagery, her works explore feelings of identity, desire and conflict within an information-saturated world.