Samantha English Metalwork

Our memories are scattered and frayed at the edges, they are at the mercy of our emotions and desires and carry the complexity and weight of our own narratives.  Exploration can be laboured, fractured and fragile. It brings forth glimpses of a past eroded by time and emotion.

Samantha’s exploration of memory originated as she experienced a reminiscence bump, a tendency in older adults to have an increased recollection of memories from childhood and adolescence. Samantha sought to explore the reliability, the truth and the fragmentation of her own memories. As she works on each piece Samantha seeks to capture a fragment, a sensation or feeling of a memory and through the treatment of the metals, she explores and captures the fragility, decay and the preciousness of those memories.

The vessels, landscapes and sculptures, through both the process of making and their final form, wane between the uncontrollable and the controlled; they are both captured and destroyed.