ARTIST BIo

Sam Crossley is a British/Dutch artist based in South-West England. He recently completed a BA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University where he graduated with 1st Class Honours. Crossley works across painting, printmaking, drawing and hand drawn animation.

‘My practice explores a combination of autobiographical and imagined experiences, filtered through a queer lens to create emotionally charged environments. My work sets the stage for events that are both pending and past, where there is a suggestion that something has happened or is about to happen. I’m drawn to the tension between the before and after, visible and hidden, presence and absence, where meaning remains unresolved, and questions linger. Playful visuals collide with darker themes.

The works are often introspective, using strategies such as doubling, repetition, patterning and recurring motifs to communicate the residue of feelings: obsession, longing, tension, intimacy and shame. These mirrored figures and repeated marks reflect an obsessive pursuit of meaning, trying to get to the centre of a thought, to the centre of what matters, while often landing somewhere completely different. Motifs such as shadows, doorways, corners, holes, and spheres appear frequently in my images. These elements suggest passage and transformation—portals into an emotional space. These dark spots become spaces of secrecy and hiding, of repressed feelings and the charged possibility that something might be revealed and bought into the light.

Mark-making is an essential part of how I construct and undo an image. I scratch into surfaces, dry brush, rub out, and remove paint with cloth—acts of pulling back, erasing and revising. This mirrors the way I negotiate what’s visible and what’s hidden in life: what’s said and what’s swallowed. The act of taking paint away becomes a gesture of denial—an echo of the queerness embedded in my practice.’