Artist Profile - Samantha Bews

Samantha Bews is a theatre artist working across numerous roles including installation artist, writer, actor and poet. Her written work is published by Currency Press, Routledge, Playworks, Garrett Publishing, Liquid Ambers and Mark Time among others, and housed in the Australian Script Writing Centre. She is a Playworks/Varuna Fellowship recipient and has participated in residencies with Punctum Inc and MASC. Her installations have appeared for Artlands Out and About, the George Paton Gallery, Phee Broadway theatre, as have been documented in AWARE, the French non-profit archive for female artists, as part of the Care Project by Jacqueline Miller. She is currently collaborating with Wes Campbell on Delightful Conversations, in which a man living with Parkinson’s and Lewis Bodies dementia converses with a crip artist using all sorts of language and including words. 

 

Of working with the felt sense Sam writes:

“The felt sense is the feeling of zingy rightness when an installation or poem comes together.  It’s the delicious delight when something works; and the jangled pokiness when it doesn’t. It is the sense I need to push this of an idea; or I need to tweak that of a line. It is a bodily knowing, and the thrill of not knowing within the limits of your own skin. 

Artistic content that rises from the felt sense is a far more subtle and mysterious thing. Poems can rise from a feeling within the body. A place in the body can hold different colours and emotional tones. Bodily organs can hold stories connected to a person’s past, psychology, beliefs. Blood, cells, dana – and the morphogenetic fields within that set everything alight – are shot through with our ancestry. Learning to listen for/to these whisperings takes time, and a softly softly quiet.”