Samantha Sweeting: A History of the World

About

Herrick Gallery is proud to present new work by Samantha Sweeting. A History of the World is a Lilliputian dialogue drawing together the presentational languages of natural history and the museological in a miniature world of the souvenir. It is a categorised assembly of the treasures and trinkets of a lifetime. This most personal collection of objects is punctuated by dolls house furniture, which lends giant scale to these tokens of absent bodies and experiences, whilst the recurring presence of nests, eggs and houses draws the object assembly into a naturalist reading of animal gestation and birth. Through the devices of its presentation, these objects that constitute the creation myth of a single life give way to a history of the world. Samantha Sweeting (b. Singapore, 1982) is an interdisciplinary artist based in London. Drawing upon memory, myth, psychoanalytic theory, fairytales and the domestic, her practice uses embodied storytelling to examine human and animal behaviour, boundaries and desire. Samantha's work has recently been exhibited in Tate Liverpool's Alice in Wonderland, which toured to MART in Italy and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany. Recent solo shows have been at Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana and Blanc Gallery in Belgium. Her artwork is included in the Moby-Dick Big Read project. Samantha is currently undertaking an artist residency at the Spitalfields City Farm, focusing on audio recording. Text by Luke Rodilosso