LI / LU, Sam Owen Hull

Gallery ‘74 01 Jul 23 - 09 Sep 23

Sam Owen Hull is a contemporary artist working at the intersections of fine art, craft and more recently sculpture. Her work explores liminal spaces - the places in between - to reflect and make sense of our increasingly polarised society.

Sam uses the materials traditionally associated with painting - canvas stretched over a wooden frame and paint - and reconfigures them, pushing at edges and expectations. Painterly, gestural brushstrokes are given a sense of movement by shadows and drips, with colours pushing against each other forming an illusion of space. These marks are constrained and controlled by embroidered stitches, bringing the material presence of the cotton warp and weft of the canvas back to the surface, pinning the marks down. The contrasts within Sam’s work - illusion and solidity, presence and absence, movement and stasis, flatness and texture, fast and slow - become mechanisms for Sam to think through tensions we face in contemporary society.

Through the composition of her works, Sam finds a balance between the urban and natural, our need for edges, borders and structure against our desire for freedom; and strives to create a moment of beautiful resolution as respite in an otherwise turbulent world.

Sam Owen Hull lives and works in Manchester. Since graduating from a Fine Art Degree in 1994, she has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and her work is in private collections around the world. Alongside her studio practice, she creates and delivers workshops with children and young people in schools and community settings across the city. She is an Associate Artist at Manchester Art Gallery

Curator: Michelle Keeling