Two large drawings sit side by side, equal in proportion, an entrance door to the café of Nottingham Castle dividing the space between them. Their sole two subjects seem in dialogue with each other; in each of the drawings, two figures with skeletal heads sit up within an outline of their bodies, surrounded by discarded objects and patterns – carefully positioned so that they face each other across the physical gap of their display space. Twin works in all but colour and symbolism, A Tale of 2 Lives poignantly utilises colour to tell a story of self-love, perspective and care. As the viewer’s gaze shifts from the first work, entirely in black and white, to the vibrant canvas of the second piece, the words that float around the figure become clear: ‘isolation’ ‘cure ‘unseen’ juxtapose the more positive terms made up of ‘valued’ ‘autonomy and ‘self-loved’ that scatter the colour-infused canvas. It is this progression from and transgression of stifling and repressive constructions of identity that underpin Samuel’s interdisciplinary practise.
Working at an intersection of disability politics, gender, and identity, Christopher Samuel’s works span a range of mediums. Films, archival materials, installations and a creative research practise are the pathways through which the artist explores questions of intimacy and realities. A graduate of Fine Art from De Montfort University, Leicester, Samuel often draws on his position as a Black disabled artist from a working-class background in his practise, engaging with the treatments and experiences that he has consequently encountered. The artist has had work featured in exhibitions at Attenborough Art Centre, Unlimited for Art B&B, Blackpool, and has work currently featured as part of the Towards New Worlds exhibition currently open at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
Commissioned by the organisation Sex with Cancer, Swinging in the Wind is a series of images developed following Samuel’s in-depth conversations with male cancer patients around the illness and its effects on sexuality. Fitting within the stylistic framework of the artist’s previous works – Cripple and Housing Crisis, for example– the works exist as images of heavily redacted NHS pamphlets, leaving a few carefully selected words visible. In How does it work now we read ‘I…need to know more’ and in It’s a Fucking Flood, Samuel lays bare the indignation: ‘You call this leakage’. These are carefully strung together words, collated together from longer, medical pieces we do not have access to. Constructed ideas of masculinity, sexual agency and virility are explored in This is Hell where we read ‘Erection 4 4 hours’ and in This male symbol – spotlighting the six words that come together to form ‘but it’s all about the orgasm’. This relationship between intimacy, agency and sexuality threads throughout the works, bursting through the clinical and depersonalised nature of their original texts to overpower them.
Notably, Samuel had initially hoped to rely on texts from erotic literature for this piece, but as his interviews with cancer-diagnosed and surviving individuals progressed, he shifted to working with medical documents. It is through this explicit engagement with the medical realm that Samuel sharply opens up space for conversations on the intimate and the personal, in turn dismantling restrictive ideas of masculinity and illness.
‘A lot of my process is redaction to create new narratives within documents’, Samuel says, and indeed, through his ironic subversion and artistic engagement with dominant constructions of illness, disability and medical needs, the artist breathes autonomy and feeling into considerations of these experiences.
This is further exemplified through his digital artwork Cared 4 Network. Drawing on personal experiences within the care system, Samuel has created a log resembling one used by care companies to monitor the support prescribed or needed for those in care. Crucially, Samuel’s log subverts the dynamic here, instead documenting the support of the care system by the cared for. Doses of ‘Lack of empathy’, ‘Giving agency’ and ‘Surveilling’ are ironically assessed on a day-by day basis within a given week. A subversive and playful examination of the ‘patient-carer’ relationship, Samuel’s exploration of this dynamic resonates with the broader structures of society, medicine, disability and care that it sits within. It is in equal parts a reclamation of agency and a call to interrogate the power dynamics that underpin the often prescriptive, intrusive and restrictive nature of medical and social treatment. Samuel reframes the gaze of these documents, poetically and emphatically surfacing the experiences they rarely seek to capture.
Christopher is part of the group show Towards New Worlds at MIMA until Feb 5 2025. He has co-curated the exhibition Kaleidoscopic Realms with Jennifer Gilbert, showing at Nottingham Castle until 3 Nov 2024. Learn more about his work here.
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