Sam Lock’s work marks a perpetual process of becoming. Reflecting on the materiality of presence and absence, Lock’s paintings navigate the intangible and ever fleeting nature of time and memory, in which clarity gives way to ambiguity. The concept of time has been one of Lock’s primary themes in painting - time to create; history and memory; and traces of other times and places. This ‘poetry of yesterday’ is sensed in all of his paintings. These are not paintings that reveal themselves at a glimpse - even to the artist himself. Lock’s canvases trace the memory of reciprocal exchange between artist and medium, where painted surfaces evolve from the artists’ brush strokes in ways that cannot be controlled or anticipated. The physicality of his process is evident throughout his paintings, understanding memory not as static but as growing, branching, reshaping - a living terrain. Lock’s expansive gestures leave sweeping movements on a monumental scale, as well as in his smaller works; they capture the moment of encounter, where other pieces evolve over time in unpredictable ways. Here, paint and canvas merge into one as Lock shares authorship of his works with a medium that asserts its own agency. Paint that soaks, cracks, and settles into the canvas ensures a body of work that is not created, but becomes - shifting through the physical realm in an alchemical journey towards the metaphysical.
"Lock has talked of his aim to ‘submit himself to the canvas’, eliminating extraneous thought in order to guarantee a purity of response in which concentration and intuition, thought and action, go hand in hand"
Ian Massey
Lock’s preoccupation with ‘the presence of absence’ is evident throughout his works. Inspired by the works of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, the equivalence of the spoken word and protracted silence influence Lock’s practice. Each canvas is a pendulum - swinging between past and present, substance and memory, anchored in the physical world yet suspended in the intangible. Emerging from a process of responsiveness rather than design, Lock is guided by a sensitivity to chance, change, and the unknown. Arising in fragments - shards of half-remembered stories - these elements collide, converse, repel, and gradually find coherence. Meaning is not fixed but formed in the interplay: between surfaces, between moments, between Lock and the work itself. What emerges is not a singular narrative, but a layered field of resonance, difference, and connection - altogether unexpected, and discovered only in relation. Through layered surfaces, nuanced gestures, and the looming presence of absence itself, Lock explores how material can hold echoes of time; bearing witness to the quiet tension between permanence and impermanence, presence and absence.