Anouska Samms’ practice incorporates sculptures, large-scale tapestries and moving image. Her work provokes conversations around mimicry, hapticity as sensorial communication, deconstruction and the domestic.
Exploring the inherent properties of the materials themselves, Samms’ harmoniously combines distinct modes of making. Negotiating the languages of painting, textiles and ceramics, she draws on a breadth of references from contemporary fashion, the 1970s British New Ceramics movement, and the abstraction of Art Informel of the 1950s. Samms takes the mechanisms and aesthetics of traditional crafts as inspiration, yet through her embrace of gesture, new hybrid structures are proposed; animating an experimentation with structure and functionality. Consequently Samms’ creates a contemporary interplay between design, craft and fine art.
Samms visually communicates mimicry and mimesis, exploring the interconnectedness of imitation with the repetitive patterns and processes of weaving and textiles. Here Samms’ ‘material mimicry’ serves as a metaphor for yielding to one’s environment, whether that be the external, the domestic, or the internal psyche. Mimicry is not exclusively practiced by animals. From social behaviour to fashion and material culture, humans too imitate resemblances for survival. Through Samms’ use of assemblage and her consistent motifs of hues and textures, she draws out the ways emotional experiences can be disguised in culture through surface and aesthetic representation. From the continual deconstruction of her handwoven silk and hair textiles, to her fractured ceramic shards, Samms visually explores the gooey rupturing underneath a protective layer.