December 16, 2025 - February 28, 2026
Jonathan Smart Gallery will be closed from 3pm Sat 20 December 2025 until 11am 11 February 2026.
Installation view - front gallery
Installation view - front gallery
Installation view - front gallery
Installation view - front gallery
Installation view - front gallery
Untitled 2 (Upended) and Untitled 3 (Upended)
Installation view - back gallery
Untitled 6 (Upended) and Untitled 7 (Upended)
Sam Harrison with Untitled 7 (Upended)
The figure is Sam Harrison's metier - fertile ground for a practise that ranges energetically across sculpture, woodcuts and inks.
In this new exhibition the title work Upended, is a female nude modelled in white plaster presented upside down. The sculpture is balanced on the point of a shoulder with one leg upright, and the other folded in a right angle from the hip. The pose is powerful yet prone, and the modelling tender - there being both grace and heft in the strength of this inversion. It is playful, vulnerable and mighty strong.
The drawings on the wall behind look similar in form - upended and seemingly falling to the floor. But they have terrific presence. Drawn in blood with a goat's hair brush (then varnished to seal and set the colour), their outline, their use of negative space, and the way pockets of blood are allowed to pool, very sensitively describe the female form. Along with a drawing in grey ink which is wetter in application (and somehow more threatening and vulnerable in feel), these paperworks are utterly compelling.
The artist himself is also present in the room. A near life-size standing Self-Portrait from 2019, occupies the niche opposite the Gallery entrance. The front of this male nude (cropped at the shoulders and neck like the other sculptures in the show), has a curiously abraided, ossified surface to it. The torso in particular is almost mummified in appearance. The legs and back less so. And the entire form is rubbed with blood and wax. The effect is strange and prescient. The tension inherent in the sculpture of Auguste Rodin survives still, in this the twenty-first century.
The three works in the back Gallery are delightfully different. All are black with very little white. And form, modelled here in pulped flax as well as plaster, is flocked black - a rendered surface that absolutely eats light.Harrison takes the contour of the female buttock, beautifully elegant in Cropped Torso (Upended), and grows that curve into a monumental wall work, Untitled 7. Dark, dense and tactile, this abstraction from the human form is commanding from distance with its scale, whilst up close the texture of the flocked ground ripples like a landscape and shivers like goosebumps on flesh.
J.S.
Selected works
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| Untitled 1 (Upended) | Untitled 4 (Upended) |
Untitled 7 (Upended)
Untitled 7 (Upended) detail view
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| Upended - front view | Upended - rear view |
Cropped torso (Upended)
2025
ink on paper
1100 x 805mm framed
Exhibited in
Upended
2025
(cow) blood and damar varnish on paper
1100 x 805mm framed
Exhibited in
Upended
2025
(cow) blood and damar varnish on paper
1100 x 805mm framed
Exhibited in
Upended
2025
ink on paper
1100 x 805mm framed
Exhibited in
Upended
2025
flocked plaster
320 x 350 x 260mm
Exhibited in
Upended
2025
flocked flax pulp
2000 x 2930mm framed
Exhibited in
Upended
2018
waxed plaster and fibreglass
600 x 1000 x 630mm
Exhibited in
Upended
2025
steel, waxed plaster and fibreglass
1660 x 1150 x 630mm
Exhibited in
Upended
2025
ink on paper
1070 x 805mm
Exhibited in
Upended
2019
steel, waxed plaster and (sheep) blood
1700 x 500 x 350mm
Exhibited in
Upended
2025
flocked resin on paper
330 x 450mm framed
Exhibited in
Upended