Chance encounters 2011

Some reflections on my practice – July 2012

At this time I endeavour to create ‘nothing’, with things left to chance, devoid of control, and I seek to better comprehend the importance of that.

The notion of nothing locates no landscape, no notion, no structure.

And so it is a liberating space, but demanding oneself to construct a meaning, purpose, priority, significance and value. My work seeks to touch this world without constructs – the ‘nothing world’ with its wide horizon. And at the same time it asks of the unimportance of the concrete world in which I quite contentedly reside!

Expressed another way, my process harkens philosophically to both Zen as well as a more nihilistic western understanding, yet my experience is they have an aesthetic appreciation in both spheres.

My practice revolves around how meaning, significance and value are constructed.

I endeavour to critically challenge aesthetic doctrines of form, expression and gesture by proposing a new value for inexpressive art, and by emphasizing the significance of chaos in the contemporary creative act.

In my work I seek a tension between a visual seductiveness and their nihilistic means of production, for they are created predominately without control – either by means of an anachronistic marbling-like process, or a dynamic fluid means of production, or in the sculptural work with uncontrollable solvents then reined into form.

The author and critic Ruth Learner observed, ‘Sampson’s interest in materials and process, and a use of everyday materials, continues to break down the life/art frontier and lends the work an organic physicality and open endedness. This tradition too links Sampson’s work with that of sculptor Hany Armanious, but Sampson’s exploration is perhaps more oblique, tending towards an alchemic process and an emphasis on dissolving, coagulation and transmutation.’[1]

And similarly Dr Alison Inglis observed that, ‘Despite Sampson’s mission to drain all meaning from his images, their painterly pyrotechnics, playful titles and gentle subversion of our expectations ultimately only underline our determination to find significance in visual expression.  As Ted Colless has observed so perceptively, Bill Sampson’s marbled paintings are “a mirror to our own desire for a meaningful relationship with art”.’[2]

---

[1] Ruth Learner, Longer Little Deaths: Moulds for Anamonitored Experiences, http://www.artinfo.com.au/reviews/read/longer-little-deaths-moulds-for-anamonitored-experiences May 2011

 

[2] E. Colless, ‘Undiscovered: Bill Sampson’, Australian Art Collector, April – June, 2007, pp 108-181