Samantha Small is an artist based
in Canberra, Australia. She came to the Gueststudios to work on a project about
her partner John, who passed away exactly a year ago. She came her to make
a personal pilgrimage in memory of him.
Since John was born in The Hague, this city was the right place to start
her journey.
She takes much interest in the personal, individual
and private lives of strangers, lives of people she doesn´t know but to which
she can also relate to at the same time. There´s always a connection between
her own life and those of the other subjects in her work. For example she´s
related as a traveler to Susan, the subject of her project ´Love Susan´. This
project came into being after Samantha found a collection of postcards on a
secondhand market. All the postcards were send by the same person, who was
traveling around Europe in the ´80s. Samantha reconstructed Susans journey and
made exactly the same trip to 8 countries in 8 weeks. http://www.samanthasmall.com.au/page5.htm
Clearly there
are similarities between her other works and the project she´s working on right
now in the Gueststudio. She uses the same kind of approach in this project, by
collecting an archive of fragments of a person´s life. Only this time the
subject of her project isn´t a stranger but somebody really close to her, so indirectly
it´s about her own life too and about her own process of dealing with a great
loss in her life.
So far she
worked out one memorial sign on paper and mounted the signs on a few places in
the city. But while she was spreading the memorials in public space, it didn´t
feel right to her to just leave them out on the street while they seemed to
vanish in the environment. She realised that this wasn´t the right place or way
to show the memorials and that she wanted to keep them in protection instead of
putting them out on the streets in public.
To Samantha it felt like a surprise that her
project didn´t turn out the way she thought it would, but on the other hand it
feels like change and surprise are a natural part of the process she´s in at
the moment. The project is
about her discovering what mourning is and how she can deal with loss. But it
isn´t a self-help project, for Samantha it´s more like being on a quest in
search of answers to unanswered questions. Because she doesn´t know yet how to
mourn, how to feel and what to do to make herself feel beter.
She hasn´t found any
concrete answers yet, but she´s sure that certain rituals should help you as a
person and that it isn´t about the person who passed away or about a public. Instead
of making it a series of public monuments she decided to keep it personal, she
transformed a part of her studio in a memorial itself. Instead of holding on to the aura of darkness and heaviness around mourning, she wants to
turn it into a celebration of life and specifically a celebration of the life
of John. She filled the studio with objects and memories related to her partner. She wants to make something creative out of something destructive. And to her
it feels like she’s only just begun with it. 
Samantha´s partner John was an artist too and in this project she decided to work with the
same subjects, texts and materials he used too. She wanted to do something with fabric
because he used it often in his work. Samantha already covered one of the
pictures on the wall of the Gueststudio with a veil, something Samantha
probably wants to do to more of the memories. The veils are still a bit
transparent, while they also cover up a what's behind it, so you can only see
an impression of the reality underneath it.
We´re really
glad to offer Samantha a place where she can work on this special project, in
this intense and emotional period. She prefers to call it a project instead of a work, because it’s
about the process. There are no steady rules, anything can change, she just has
to figure out what feels good to her in this process. Very exciting!
