“Navigating our daily lives, both the paths that we choose and those that we reject inspire the directions we’ve taken and where we will head. My practice explores the intersection between our constructed values and how they permeate our relationship with time. I am interested in how our environment influences the way in which we live our lives and value our time on this earth.

Since I can remember I’ve felt different, different in the way I observed life from others, as if observing from a different objective. I guess I could use some salmon swimming against the stream analogy, but it’s more I feel like one of those interesting black googly eyed fish, that was too busy looking he wasn’t concerned for the direction of the stream or where the rest of the salmon were swimming, he just was interested by something. I’m interested in these paths, corporate ladders or for a lot of others that don’t fit the mould side-ways and up and down jungle gyms. I’m interested in the intrigue we have on those paths and whether we are focused for what lays at the end or the spring of the next step. While most recently it’s been brought to my attention that it’s quite possibly a symptom of having ADHD, it is however my lens, my lens cultivated through curiosity, disappointment, environment, experience and feeling. It is with looking through my lens that my practice stems and it’s the value I perceive in it’s individuality that excites the curiosity I have to view through, understand and interrogate the unique lenses we all view the world.”

“Exploring the way we think as individuals, the creative processes by which I construct my artwork acts as a metaphor for the process by which we individually try to achieve our own sense of equilibrium. My decision making as an artist mirrors the way in which we all navigate through compromise to achieve our own understanding of happiness and contentment. Working through leftover scraps of raw linen, printmaking, sculpture and abandoned experimentation I had accumulated to date in my practice evoked the memories of self-doubt and inspired self- discovery over the years. Compositionally placing and sewing piece by piece the patchwork, my decision making formed not only an abstract history but a new road map with unexpected turns I couldn’t foresee, but only now could understand their significance looking back.

Often too busy to see we find ourselves caught up in the rut of everyday life, yet I noticed looking back these unexpected turns of inspiration or experimentation always occurred from an unexpected intrigue for which I chose to explore. My work since I can remember has always been concerned with this act of looking and being engaged with an inner moment of intrigue and investigation for which I am now only coming to understand.” – Sam Holt, 2020.

Sam Holt is a Sydney based Australian emerging artist. He completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at SCA, Sydney in 2017, including an exchange at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. Awarded the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Painting in 2017, he once again moved to explore opportunities in Berlin only recently returning in late 2019 to Sydney.

Since graduating from art school, Sam has held three solo exhibitions at Artereal Gallery, Present Future in 2015, The Distance Between in 2017 and Caught between snorkelling and drowning, we swam in 2019. His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions and been exhibited at Sydney Contemporary (2015, 2017, 2019) and Art Central Hong Kong (2017).

In 2017 Sam Holt was awarded the Marten Bequest for Painting (awarded by the Australia Council for the Arts). Following this significant milestone, Sam relocated to Berlin in 2018.

In late 2019, Sam Holt was invited to create a new site specific work for Fuck Ads Make Art Festival India in Juhu, Mumbai. The resulting work was a spectacular constructed painting stretched across a 32 x 22 ft billboard opposite Juhu Beach.

Sam has also been a finalist in the Korean Ausrtalian Art Foundation Prize (2017), the Paddington Art Prize (2017) and the Churchie Emerging Art Prize. Sam’s works are held in numerous Australian and international corporate and private collections including those of Artbank and Servcorp.

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