Sam Wood An Exhibition

"There are many things in our lives which are obscured or concealed and they are often at the heart of how we come to conceive of ourselves, whether that is to do with our own personal identity, or some conception of national belonging."

Sam Wood has become known for his depictions of public arenas, luxury restaurants, hotels and gardens. Wood’s works occupy the space between the public and private and evoke the imprint we leave as occupiers of environments designed for us to perform.

In this, Wood’s fourth solo show, he turns his attention to something more intimate, making a shift to address domestic spaces whilst continuing an interest in how they are used in a performative sense, examining grand spaces that act as homes as well as stages. The motif of the garden and ‘plans’ for gardens endure and further the duality of internal and external, of the public and the private. Wood’s gardens are at once formalised and playful, enclosed as well as sprawling, they are allowed to proliferate, but only within the bounds of his own rigid compositional structure.

This feeling of anxiousness when caught between something intimate and something exposed is furthered as Wood first explores painting on a large scale. The larger works approach narrative without dictating to the viewer any linear progression; they manipulate line and colour to create voids into - and barriers from - the various elements of the composition, sometimes obscuring the original focus of the painting entirely, sometimes bringing it jarringly to the surface.