SAM LOCK
THE MEMORY OF WHAT COMES NEXT

There are silences and hiding places that are both poetic and activating, and a physicality and immediacy, where his aim to ‘submit’ himself to the canvas, eliminates extraneous thought in order to guarantee a purity of response - a response arising through concentration and intuition where thought and action, go hand-in-hand. This is what Lock refers to as the ‘poetry of moments’, of the spiritual nature of now becoming then, and how what started as waves of actions, becomes a forest of memory. Lock is interested in marks, resulting in paintings, that communicate both instantly and slowly - to slow down perception, and to create forms that don’t reveal themselves fully, all at once, through a filling up and emptying of space and surface; traces and echoes exist in a palimpsest, a build-up of complex painted marks, layers and statements that conceal and reveal, where time becomes held in a concrete way and the painting achieves a physical weight and substance. These layers allow you to swim in and out of the painting, they lead back in time, retaining a mystery and dynamism of the moment rather than a recollection of a misty lost past.

All we have is an overlapping of what we hope or dream, all we have known and done, tied up in the constant flux of the now passing through us.

Memory is twofold at least, acting both as an archive of experience but it is also constructive – editing, adapting and connecting our beliefs, intentions, experiences and obligations across time. Our lives are punctuated by a palimpsest of memory traces, preserved episodes and encounters that we look back upon time and again; but the significance and interpretations of these traces shifts with us as we change with time, making memory fluid and a living part of us, rather than merely living in our past; it provides us with an archaeology of now.

There is a Silvia Plath line from her poem ‘The Colossus’ which reads “I will never get you put together entirely” – which I often use to underpin my paintings. I try to find the point in painting where the works are unstable in some way, with windows and fault lines that undermine them – somewhere before they are complete. Something always remains secret, forgotten, hidden or lost.

The works in this exhibition are connected together like areas on a map, the landscape changes but the search remains the same; a search for the poignancy of moments in the painted act. They are roads to nowhere, and yet anywhere too; the mind fills in the gaps.

There is a poignancy in any moment, it is always someone’s first or last, significant in some way or insignificant after all; either way, moments pass through us or pass us by, a stream of something bigger than ourselves, stripping self-importance. Our memories attach us to these moments and we use them to identify ourselves, to recognise ourselves or to portray ourselves to others.

I am drawn more to a state of not knowing, to have questions rather than answers, to be lost rather than certain and to travel without destination. My paintings are a monument and marker to the ever present, present moment, helping to give a physicality to all that is fleeting.


Sam Lock, 2023