Samantha Jade

@___ samanthajade ___ 

Samantha Jade (b. 2000, Eora / Sydney) is a photographic artist living and working within Gadigal land of Eora Country in NSW, Australia. Jade’s practice materially operates within the garden space but is applied to a broader ecological framework. The garden is not a physical plot of land, but a metaphysical space for learning, collaborations, and entanglement. Located within the fields of art and ecofeminism, Jade’s practice applies the framework of ‘sympoiesis’, or ‘making-with’, to an art context to produce transwordly cameraless images borne from an artist-garden partnership. In the process of making-with the garden she explores the transformative potential of creative collaboration with the non-human, and the subsequential reinvention of self as an ecological being. Further, Jade aims to reform photography’s taxing material history through the development of a compost-based processing technique doubled as garden fertiliser. The images are the outcome of cross-species exchange, ethics of care, and mutual sustainment. Although abstract, they speak to a shared language that has been established between artist and garden, one based on ethical connection and a willingness to integrate, without prejudice, into Earth’s wider ecology. Through diverse eco-alchemical photographic processes, Jade’s work argues for the cross-fertilisation between scholars, scientists, artists, communities, and non-human beings to reconfigure current separations and manage co-living on our damaged planet.