Sam Bailey: Shadow Archive

Sam Bailey is a London based painter who won the celebrated HIX Award in 2017, after completing his BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Since winning the award Bailey has produced a body of work referencing images of activists and protestors based on archival photographs. The artist has focused on the decade of the 1980s, a pre-digital age, and an era that was rife with social and political upheaval and protest.
Though using photography as a starting point, Bailey’s paintings are not photorealistic; instead the handmade is apparent, the paint is allowed to bleed into and run across surfaces, disrupting the source material and creating a sense of interference. Allowing the materials to have a life of their own, moving away from a clean photographic representation, it is Bailey’s hope that they evoke something of the past; a sense of memory and time, rather than being purely photographic.