Unfolding: Sam Hodge

Unfolding is a series of more than twenty works by Sam Hodge, made with paint she grinds herself from rocks and earth gathered along the East Anglian coast, from Bawdsey, Hunstanton and West Runton to the Thames. The pigment is rolled onto discarded packaging, unfolded flat, and printed onto paper.

Hodge began collecting geological samples in 2016. “I started walking around the coast of England and Wales around the time of Brexit when the edge of the country seemed to gain greater relevance.” She studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and worked for years as a conservator of paintings, and each site yields its own colour: Bawdsey gives warm yellow and brown from the iron-rich Red Crag Formation and a light grey from the London Clay beneath it, while the red chalk cliffs of Hunstanton give a deep orange-red. The provenance of the pigment is recorded on every print.

The packaging supplies the titles. “I’m fascinated by packaging,” Hodge says. “Designed to carry consumer goods, it often has marketing messages telling us how these products are going to save the world.” Flattened and printed, the pharmaceutical boxes, fruit trays, cigarette packs and beer cartons read as icons, buildings or figures on totem poles.

“Earth colours such as red and yellow ochres have a long human association,” she says. “They were the first pigments to be used by people and are often endowed with symbolic meaning as a deep connection to the earth.”