Leftovers
Artist Anouska Samms’s new collection, Leftovers, is inspired by housing insecurity and living in close quarters (image: Gareth Williams).
“Hoarding is a coping mechanism for scarcity,” artist Anouska Samms says. Her Leftovers exhibition captures the emotional experience of living in insecure housing through pieces made from materials that would usually be tossed away: leather offcuts, surplus silk yarns, and strands of human hair. “You end up amassing a lot when you fear your life shifting, or things being taken away from you.”
All of the vessels, lamps, curtains and sculptures in Samms’s show at Greatorex Street Gallery were made in her bedroom. “I have had studios, but they have become so expensive and the conditions are terrible,” she says. Samms shares a home with her mother and grandmother, and although she has adjusted to being a bedroom artist, it can make her a challenging flatmate at times. “It’s not nice getting packages of hair in the post,” says Samms’s mother Carina, who is invigilating the exhibition alongside her. “The screen became bit of a health and safety nightmare,” Samms adds, gesturing to her largest piece, a towering divider covered in leather, fabric, and clumps of wispy, bleached blonde hair. “It was blocking the flat’s only exit.”
The screen which previously blocked the door of Samms’s flat (image: Reliant Imaging).
Samms transmits the claustrophobia of living in close quarters through vessels made out of fabric squeezed between slabs of ceramic, and grisly, tattered curtains which provide no privacy at all. “I’ve had to move around a lot for various reasons, and the work is informed by my own experiences of how difficult is to find safe and affordable housing,” she says. “I’m interested in how that’s becoming more of a common, shared experience for so many people, and it’s only getting worse.” The show, which was curated by writer and editor Francesca Perry, has allowed her pieces to come together for the first time as a family. “I see the objects as individual pieces, but they have to be in conversation with each other to really speak to those themes of uncertainty and belonging,” Samms says. All together, they capture the grotesque nature of human bodies and other organisms sharing the same space, with tufts of tapestry floating on the surface of steel sculptures like mildew, and lamps with shades made out of fabric clogged with hair.
Samms’s rot vessels are made out of ceramic and tapestries with tufts of human hair (image: Gareth Williams).
At the same time, the softness of her textiles, the thumbprints tenderly embedded into her ceramics, and the red and yellow bulbs in her lamps create the cosy feeling of a well-loved home. “It’s often women and non-binary people who end up maintaining the home – not just cleaning it but also making it look warm and inviting,” she says. Samms uses techniques such as ceramics and weaving, which are laborious and traditionally associated with women, to mirror the gendered and time-consuming nature of domestic work. The human hair which is woven between yarns the colour of blood vessels acts as a nod towards the unseen figure who upkeeps the home. “It’s a bit like when you sweep or hoover and you find clumps of hairs within the dust,” she says. “There’s a hint of this invisible labourer.” Her pieces writhe with contradictions: they are inviting and repulsive, decorative and disgusting, monstrous and maternal.
The show at Greatorex Street Gallery was the first time Samms’s work was exhibited together as a family (image: Reliant Imaging).
When Samms speaks about her creations, she refers to them as entities with their own will and consciousness. “When something goes wrong, I just say, OK, the material wants to be something else,” she says, giving the example of using fragments from a vessel which exploded in the kiln to create a new piece. “I didn’t intentionally make those shards,” she says. “But it represents how people who maintain the home sometimes have to fracture or extend themselves.” This animistic approach to her work also informs her resourcefulness. “If you think of the material as having an energy or a spirit, throwing something away feels like lost potential,” she says. For Samms, hoarding is a kind of sorcery: she stockpiles scraps in order to alchemise them into something wrenching with life. “I do think they know what they want to be,” she says. “And they’re going to tell me.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown