Sam Sharma

Artist Statement

Contemporary Art Practice MA Degree Show, July 2025

Phantoms  

My practice incorporates primarily painting and printmaking. I occasionally work with objects and textiles. I have an enduring interest in the body as a site of knowledge which reaches back through my previous career in medicine and forward into my ongoing artistic research. 

‘Phantoms’ is comprised of a series of paintings and a vintage toy pram with grass grown from seed. Each work is also a complete work on its own. It is a continuation of a practice-led enquiry that focusses on the visual representation of personal, embodied experience, incorporating both the particularity of the impulses that drive the work and a multiplicity of meaning and association for the viewer. The concept of phantoms connects several concerns within the work, alluding to the hauntings, illusions, shadows and projections that form perception and experience. 

In the paintings I construct a personal cosmology of figures, animals, medical manikins, embryonic models, and interiors, creating a visual language that suggests encounters with internal states that overlap with, but do not directly describe the outside world. In the medical field the anatomical phantom is a simulation of the body for teaching purposes, a stand-in. In the paintings it becomes a symbol of medical understanding of the body, death and pre-natal life. Hauntings are suggested in the materiality of the work, the layers of paint and gesture of the brush, traces of my body in the expressive language of the paint. Within the installation, ‘Grass growing’ provides a real-world counter point to the dream imagery of the paintings. It alludes to themes of nurture, nature, life cycle, fertility and memory. The installation suggests states of transition, realms of the mind, and fragmentary, inarticulate moments. There is a sense of experience as dispersed and unstable, both embodied and intangible.