Samantha Clark

Samantha Clark

I live in a place of water. My home lies beside a wide freshwater loch, Orkney’s main reservoir. The burn that flows out of it skirts the edge of the garden. The sea that encircles this island is just visible, over the rise of the fields. This water has seeped into me, into my bones, my blood, my dreams and drawings.
Every day I watch this water. And then I try to draw it.
Drawing water is a paradox. Water’s essence is movement. And yet drawing takes the hand’s gesture and holds it still, recorded in the mark that remains. The slow, repetitive method I employ makes each drawing a receptacle of time, a net that gathers up all these moments so they are visible in a single instant that shows the timespan of the drawing’s own making. Not to stop the flow, but to introduce a meander, an eddy. Then you can get beneath the undulating
surface glitter and see there is depth there too.

Samantha originally trained at Edinburgh College of Art, Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts, and the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. In 2010 she gained an MA in Values in Environment from the Philosophy Department at the University of Central Lancashire.

Samantha was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews in 2017, a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2018 and a Cove Park Scottish Emerging Writer Residency in 2019. She received a Society of Authors Award in 2020 and a commission from the National Library of Scotland in 2021.

Samantha has taught at Edinburgh College of Art, the University of the West of Scotland, as well as guest lecturing at the Tasmanian School of Art, Central St Martins and Gray’s School of Art. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and I now provide online tutoring for the University of Hertfordshire and teach occasionally at the University of the Highlands and Islands.