Sam Martin draws a broad swath of influences into his painting practice, including but not limited to: Surrealism, Op-Art, traditional textile making, ancient forms of writing, action painting, the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, psychoanalysis, camouflage techniques of butterflies, Man Ray’s dust paintings and the theories of Michel Foucault. For Phenemar, Martin presents a series of dense pieces, each with varying degrees of paint and embroidery.

To create this body of work, Martin placed the canvases on the studio floor for months, allowing them to accumulate casual painted strokes, accidental spills and indiscriminate marks. These painted and marked canvases are then forensically covered with layers of machine sewn cotton thread, resulting in complex sequences of optically charged, labour-intensive, improvised patterns. The artist’s poems are buried within the composition, either drawn or written directly onto the surface, or recorded onto tracing paper and composed throughout the picture to create different degrees of legibility and illegibility. The energetic compositions suppress many traces of the original painting, suspending the viewer in a state of tactile stimulation. The transformation of these painted marks through to decisive embroidered forms examines a dialogue between accumulative chance, layering and incremental improvisation. This evolving process allows for a study of reorientation, slowness, focus and discovery.