About the work

I tend to draw a lot of skeletons and bone features; I like to use them to suggest both figures but also elements of landscapes, or indefinite shapes. Within the films I make, these drawings go towards sculptures and props often made from wood and plaster.

The whiteness of the forms allows the objects to fuse, and to me suggests a single unknown matter from which the different forms come from. This drawing is based upon seeing a cramped cabinet of elephant skulls at the Horniman Museum. Different curly tusks coming together, but like long wonky teeth from a busy mouth. This drawing is not so much a single mouth but different jaws about to sink into each other. The jaws create a negative form between them, like a figure, which in turn abstracts the teeth into creeping fingers around the figure’s neck. I attempt within my films to activate negative space, whether it is using forms to create sub-frames within the image, or to push out a void from the background to suggest a solid thing.

Date and country of birth

1986, GB

About the artist

Born 1986 London, Sam Austen lives and works in London. Graduated from BA Fine Art Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (2009); and Royal Academy Schools, London (2017).

Early animated cinema, graphic novels, horror film, and science fiction are particular influences on Austen’s work. Primarily he produces 16mm films that utilise a range of in-camera multi-layered special effects, shooting an array of studio-built objects, material and texts.

Austen is interested in creating an awareness of the image as a physical entity, something that wrestles with its non-physical nature, wrangling with an excessively expanding eye that flirts with both the virtual and the real. A constant vortex of looking and longing, both inwards and outwards of the image.

Selected solo exhibitions include Sentient Summer, Sundy, London (2021); Hologram Burnt On To The Retina, Farbvision, Berlin (2018); Run!! For The Present, Deptford X, London (2017); Such Animals, Paradise Row, London (2014); A Cool Drink To Cheek, Plaza Plaza, London (2014); and Angry Film, The Sunday Painter, London (2010). Selected group exhibitions include IMAGE DRUM, Royal Academy, London (2019); Out of Eye, Laure Genillard, London (2019); New Work II: Material, Cob Gallery, London (2018); CHUMMING, The Pipe Factory, Glasgow (2018); Like Honey From A Weed, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood (2017); Premiums Interim Projects, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2016); Tomb, Shrine, Survey-marker, Spare part, Enclave, London (2014); Dreamland, Garis and Hahn, New York (2014); Open Heart Surgey, The Moving Museum, London (2013); The Instability of the Image, Paradise Row, London (2013); Young London, V22, London (2012); and Seconds, The Sunday Painter, London (2011).

Awards include the ACME Studio Prize, Chelsea (2009).