106. SAM JAMIESON: A SPACE BETWEEN SUNSET AND SUNRISE.
Lilli Chambers & Lou Pennington, photographed by Samuel Jamieson, London 2021. Published within M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) issue 1 © 2021. Still Life image: Harry Nathan.
‘I have to remind myself that change is inevitable and I try to listen to my gut to know when to move with the change and when to challenge it.’ S.J.
I remember the first work I saw which you had made - a film of you dancing at dawn, please can you introduce that work and how it informed your practice?
I created that piece at a time when I was trying to distill the core elements of what my practice is and the way in which I approach design. I was trying to capture feeling over product. It was a film of me dancing at sunrise in the heath. I was trying to approach themes of sexuality and nightlife; the feelings it embodies, as well as the contradictions which inform the sublime within it. Things being stripped back and warm but also cold in the morning dew. The ecstasy of music but also the quietness of an internal experience with oneself. Those moments of tension and contradiction as well as harmony are places that I continue to look towards within my practice.
The physicality of space is something you explored and returned to a lot within your work, a particular atmosphere which feels somehow to surround you… can you contemplate what that space means to you and where does it exist?
For me the space is totally informed by bodies. A lot of my fascination around this subject comes from my community and the interventions that they apply to a space in order to give power and meaning. I'm excited by how space can be changed and reimagined.
The images you made for the first issue of M-A were incredibly intimate, they remain charged with emotion which again feels very specific to you and a specific time and yet they also could be from so many different times… do you feel that you connect to a particular feeling and a particular question while working with image?
Honesty is the main thing. I think the moments that feel the most authentic in life are those that feel both delicate and rough. Trying to understand that quality is really exciting and frustrating but I think when it is achieved, it creates the images that I appreciate most from other artists.
Your work with denim is also highly specific and yet is evolving... What is it about denim that interests you?
Its ability to hold history, both visually through the memory of the indigo dye - starting flat and then becoming its own personality, but also its historical context within counterculture. I like how there feels like there's an element of letting go within the washing process and allowing accidents to occur, and I love the way in which it sometimes feels dismissed as common or mundane when put up against other materials, but the value comes from the way in which someone lives in it.
What are your signals for change?
I often think of 'Parables of the Sower' by Octavia E. Butler when it comes to change. In it her protagonist writes:
"All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God is Change."
I have to remind myself that change is inevitable and I try to listen to my gut to know when to move with the change and when to challenge it.