Sam Jinks: Hope in the Wilderness

By Isabella Trimboli

A soul can lead, fight and kill; in the sketchy rain there, but you can’t kill where we’re dead. That’s the best thing no one has any power.

– Alice Notely, The Sea

Transfixed by the mysteries of destiny and the instability that governs our lives, Sam Jinks has created a beautiful and blistering exhibition that reflects on our own era of doubt and alarm.

A woman stands next to a large wooden wheel, pulling its lever. The wheel spins freely. The woman is pleased—her expression conveys glee, haste, and total abandonment. Sometimes her eyes are veiled, and she is shielded from the wreckage caused by her wayward navigation. The victims of her ruin are men, women, and kings, whose bodies cling desperately to the wheel, but whose efforts are in vain. In due time, some will topple off, lost to the whims of chance and providence.

This is the Rota Fortunae—known in modern parlance as the wheel of fortune—which appears again and again throughout medieval literature and art. The woman is Fortuna, the goddess of fate, ruling with fickleness and precarity. She is sometimes, but not always, a stand-in for God, doing the work of dictating the course of lives in his absence. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, fortune is the theme that runs throughout many of the tales told by the group of young women and men, who have come to a secluded Florentine villa in an attempt to outrun their own bad luck: the bubonic plague. But the stories recounted all deliver a unified, scathing truth: that the only thing one can be certain of is the cyclical nature of life and death.

Work in progress in Sam Jinks studio, 2023.

Photo: courtesy of Sam Jinks Studio

In Hope in the Wilderness, artist Sam Jinks is transfixed by the mysteries of destiny and the instability that governs lives, crafting sculptural works that reflect our own era of doubt and alarm. This is an exhibition beautiful and blistering in equal parts, full of objects that are haunted by decay, but are also pervaded by the possibility of renewal. While many of the sculptures deal in physicality, with mercurial precision—saggy skin, sinewy bodies, skulls newly stripped of flesh—they are not without questions of the mind. Permeating each of these works are ideas about faith’s fragility and how consciousness may transcend the limitations of the body.

Jinks has situated the exhibition around the idea of Rota Fortunae. One work sits at the centre of the gallery, while the other sculptures orbit it. This central figure is a reimaging of Bernini’s Corpus, a life-size bronze sculpture by the Italian master, where the crucified Christ stands suspended, arms outstretched, devoid of the wooden cross that held him. Jink’s figure is similarly elevated and

“This is an exhibition beautiful and blistering in equal parts, full of objects that are haunted by decay, but are also pervaded by the possibility of renewal.”

alone, floating in the gallery space. Below, is a pool of still water, inverting the sacred visual. The accouterments of religious iconography have been stripped back to their elemental components, so all that we are left to face is a dead body, that offers only the starkest truths about affliction and redemption. Jink’s sculptural practice, hyperreal and full of intricate detail, often creates the impulse to get up close and inspect. But the figure’s raised stature and pool of liquid create a gulf of distance between the object and the spectator, mimicking how belief requires a submission to the unreachable and ineffable.

To yield to forces beyond control or order, to accept unruliness, has become a more probing question in the spectre of plague and environmental turbulence. There has been a push to scrub clean the stains of the past few years, to pick up where we left off, and move into the future. But this future is blurred, fluctuating, and laced with uncertainty. There is no going back to the time before this collective crisis, and we must contend with the fact that the truths we have previously pushed into the far reaches of the mind have swung back to the centre of our lives. As the psychoanalytical thinker Jacqueline Rose recently wrote, ‘In the midst of a pandemic, death cannot be exiled to the outskirts of existence. Instead, it is an unremitting presence that seems to trail from room to room’.

Work in progress in Sam Jinks studio, 2023.

Photo: courtesy of Sam Jinks Studio

Works in progress in Sam Jinks studio, 2023.

Photo: courtesy of Sam Jinks Studio

To think about death and decay is often disregarded as a morbid inclination or an indulgence in doom. But Jink’s work refutes this narrative. Instead, these pieces of corporeal debris and decline offer comfort, a kind of consolation. In times of darkness and deprivation, in the ashes of the deceased, creation continues. Take the work Beast of the Isle of Bags where the remnants of a rabbit, a skull, is housing two snails, who are possibly deriving sustenance from its marrow. Sculptured with care and rigor, these mollusks offer a lesson in primordial resilience—how it might be good to move slowly in the world and retreat when needed.

Then there is Jink’s tableau of innocence and experience: a newborn baby, freshly out of the womb, who is being clutched by an elderly figure. It is impossible not to gaze at the person’s hands—mottled with purple, creased with lines, rendered frail—that seem to bare the marks of every movement and ache of a long existence. This work is a dual celebration: of new life, soft and fleetingly undisturbed. And of the life that has come before it, coarsened and weakened by time, coming to its inevitable end.

Sam Jinks in the studio, 2023.

Photo: courtesy of Sam Jinks Studio

SAM JINKS, HOPE IN THE WILDERNESS, 18 FEB – 11 MAR 2023, S+S MELBOURNE

EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW