August 18-25 SAMANTHA SUN: “VISUAL POETRY”

Sam is a Fine Art student based in London, UK. She is currently doing her BA at Chelsea College of Art and has completed a foundation diploma in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. This is her second formal exhibition and her first solo show. Her work explores the use of text, particularly popular culture song lyrics, puns and punchlines alongside collages or painted images. Lyrics and punchy quotes provide an immensely poignant and expressive springboard for the work as she sees music and other forms of writing as the most effective way to touch audiences and elicit a personal emotional response. She uses the mediums of text, paint and collage to explore broad territories of relevant to her personal life.

This body of work from the past academic year has been informed by issues regarding pro-sex feminism and the world of stripping; teetering on the edge of using the female body and nude in a way that can be empowering while inevitably confronting a culture of objectification and degradation. Drawing from the activist work of the East London Strippers Collective, a group of women who are either currently dancing or retired, she has found a platform for continuing the exploration into the job of being an exotic dancer, other forms of sex work, the stigmas surrounding it, and how to ultimately break it. Sam’s more personal work comes from the experience of being an outgoing, free spirited young woman; looking at the violently tumultuous love, sex, reckless behaviour and elusive identities that comes with being 20 years old – no longer in the era of adolescence but still barely an adult She aims to embed her personality and have it shine through in all her work, school work and personal, so that anything she has produced is unmistakably Sam.