Category: Art
I love these miniature paintings by Peckham based artist Sam Hacking, which she has painted in response to lifelong agoraphobia. The paintings are named according to the distinct personalities of each tree so that they become portraits of loving friends. I asked Sam to tell me more about her process…
Old Gertrude by Sam Hacking.
Punk by Sam Hacking.
'I've had a fear of open spaces since I was a child. Being away from enclosed areas, such as a house and exposed to large expanses of landscape & the sky produces an immediate reaction of anxiety, and in more extreme circumstances panic attacks. By my late teens, I felt so uncomfortable in 'the spaces in between', that my world became reduced to living on a sofa for 6 months. Nowadays, I can move around with more relative ease and have come to terms with my agoraphobia enough to be able to explore it through my painting.
The Bracketeers by Sam Hacking.
The Duke's maid by Sam Hacking.
Ironically I grew up in The Fens in Norfolk, which is an area of countryside that is one of the flattest and bleakest in the UK, renowned for its marshes and agricultural landscape. It is thus difficult to describe this fear as a double edged sword, but without it, the landscape wouldn't have had such a profound effect on me. There is an amusing element of Stockholm Syndrome here, where through such anxiety I have been tied with a great love and nostalgic dependency to the landscape. Painting is an immediate gesture of this exploration, and no other medium has given such a direct emotional understanding of my physical space to the spaces around me. Using tiny bulky canvases gives each painting a talisman and objectional feel to them, restricting the optical space. It makes the viewer engage with them more closely to seek out the detail, but plays with the reduction of what is essentially a large space to the confines of a tiny canvas.
The Superhero by Sam Hacking.
The Watchers of Forty Foot bank by Sam Hacking.
'Take your Portrait to the Trees' is a more specific body of work on agoraphobia. It focusing on a particular coping strategy when confronted with a large open space, where I pick out points of 'security' or a reference point of solidity of a tree, pylon, fence etc. Tying myself to that point is a kind of emotional editing process, cutting out the sensation of floating away and instead retaining a sense of grounding. On a more generalistic scale, everyone does this through familiarity of landmarks in their everyday life. It is natural to look for the boat on the horizon, or to focus on one star at a time in the sky to feel less engulfed by our own meagreness in such expanses. 'Take your Portrait to the Trees' is more specifically about my familiarity and love of trees, and thus each painting depicts a place of personal importance to me, which is why there is a playful characterisation in the titles, which helps give the emotional nature of the works the relief of a punchline.'
See Sam Hacking on Eyestorm here and on her Studio 180 website here.