About Samantha Clark
Samantha Clark is a visual artist and writer based in Orkney.
Sam received a Scottish Book Trust New Writers award in 2018 and a Scottish Emerging Writers Residency at Cove Park in 2020.
Her first book 'The Clearing' was published by Little Brown, in March 2020. Find out more on Sam's website.
Photo © Samantha Clark.
Sam's comments
' "Treading Water" records the summer of 2020 as I experienced it at home in Orkney. I live at the end of a potholed track, next to a loch, and in many ways I have been moated, protected by water, throughout the pandemic. This piece attempts to wring some understanding out of the unsteady mix of security and precariousness I was feeling, by attending carefully to the shifting beauty of water, while still alert to the monstrous suffering being caused by COVID and the even bigger threat posed by climate change. It's a meditation on time, loss, death and evanescent beauty.'
Samantha Clark's commission (PDF)
(1 MB; 15 pages)
Nadine Aisha Jassat's comments
Poet, writer and creative practitioner Nadine Aisha Jassat led the Fresh Ink initiative. She writes about Sam's commission:
'Coming to the National Library of Scotland's archive to read about the year of the pandemic, one might not expect to find a piece that feels gentle, that soothes the reader and transports them to cool water and open coastlines. Yet Sam Clark's "Treading water' does just that. The writing flows and moves like water itself as Sam takes us, lyrically and powerfully, into her moments and her Orkney world — her evocative writing making her feet our feet as we tread the water alongside her, flowing with its tides and sitting with her reflections.'