There are many ways to make a landscape painting. John Constable sketched the Suffolk landscape outdoors before finishing in the studio. Thomas Gainsborough built small landscape models using props like coal and moss.
Sam Hodge, meanwhile, finds her muse beneath the surface of the land, making her pigment from the very earth itself. At Harry CJ Wix this summer, Hodge is showing her exhibition Unfolding, a fascinating series of 20-plus artworks made from paint derived from rocks and earth found across East Anglia from Bawdsey, Hunstanton and West Runton to the Thames, rolled onto discarded and unfolded packaging then printed onto paper.
Hodge’s excavations began in 2016. “I started walking around the coast of England and Wales around the time of Brexit when the edge of the country seemed to gain greater relevance.” On her perambulations Hodge – who studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge -- learned about the geology of each place and began collecting earth and rock samples where erosion by the sea has revealed them, not only in the east but across the British coast from Devon, Cornwall, Dorset and Cumbria to her native Kent.
In her east London studio, Hodge displays some of the works in Unfolding. “I’m fascinated by packaging,” says Hodge. “Designed to carry consumer goods, it often has marketing messages telling us how these products are going to save the world.” Ranging from pharmaceutical products to fruit boxes, cigarettes and beer, these found packs have helped provide the titles of Hodge's works while the provenance of the pigment is also recorded on each print, showing how much each terroir differs in hue. Bawdsey, for example, has offered Hodge warm yellow and brown derived from iron-rich Red Crag Red Crag Formation and a light grey tone from the underlying London Clay. The red chalk cliffs of Hunstanton offer a deep orange-red.
Making each pigment is a lengthy process and as Hodge works, it's like watching a medieval alchemist. Once she has collected the geological specimens, Hodge grinds them in a pestle and mortar, mixes the powder with linseed oil, then uses a glass ‘muller’ to grind them further before putting them into tubes that preserve the ink for later use.
“It takes about two weeks before the pigments are ready to print with,” she says. “By the time I’ve finished I’m really excited to find out how the colour comes out.” Once printed, the images look like all manner of things: technological icons, buildings, creatures on totem poles.
The colours are notably calm and harmonious. “Earth colours such as red and yellow ochres have a long human association,” says Hodge. “They were the first pigments to be used by people and are often endowed with symbolic meaning as a deep connection to the earth.” They’re also very stable: “Take Aboriginal rock paintings, for instance. They have survived for thousands of years in the sun.”
Hodge used to work as a conservator of paintings, and having worked on important artworks from the Middle Ages to the present day she knows all about early painting techniques. “The Old Masters were made to last, and they knew which pigments would fade and which wouldn't,” she says. In medieval times gesso, a chalk-based primer, would typically be painted first, then laid over with tempera mixed with lapis lazuli and other colours sometimes imported from afar. Even in Roman times there was an international market in pigments, but they were underpinned by regional variations, giving each place a particular palette. In Suffolk, local pigments similar to those Hodge uses in Unfolding would have been used for church fresco painting.
Hodge is interested in the geology of the deep past, but also in how we are creating new strata that she has called "fossils of the future". “I’m drawn to discarded human-made objects,” she says. In her artist’s book A Catalogue of Misfortune, she portrayed 39 broken mobile phone screens, in her series Pelagic Plastic she portrayed translucent scraps of beached plastic, akin to the “deep-sea creatures that they are replacing in the sea, and creating a new geology of plastic on the seafloor.” Mudlarking trips to the Thames, meanwhile, found Hodge “the only one looking for bits of old coal”, and her studio is full of matter and objects ready to be turned into paint. Every place has potential for paint: Hodge has made pigment from things as various as copper piping from the remnants of a house fallen from the receding cliffs at West Runton, old bricks from the Thames shore, and clay from a hole in the ground near her house in Hackney. While Unfolding has created curiously calming images they are also a comment on the Anthropocene age – the human-centred era that has ushered in our current era of ecological and climate peril. “We should remember that geology underlies everything that's above it, that all biology comes from geology, and that geology is also created by living things," says Hodge. "Chalk, for example, is made of billions of tiny coccolith skeletons. I'm interested in the way that we throw things away, then they emerge in other places and in different forms.” We too are fleeting but as Hodge says, the interpretation of her prints remains up to you, which is part of the Unfolding.
Unfolding is at Harry CJ Wix, 7 August – 7 September. Prices from £180 for an unframed print. Each print is in an edition: mostly of three, sometimes five. Hodge’s artworks will be available from Harry CJ Wix after the exhibition
