Samantha Jade

Samantha Jade (b. 2000) is an Australian photographic artist living and working within Dharug land of the Eora nation. Jade’s practice materially operates within the garden space, but is applied to a broader ecological framework. The garden is not meerly a physical plot of land, but a metaphysical space for learning, collaborations, and entanglement. 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. Informed by ecofeminist ethos, Jade’s investigations seek to reform photography’s taxing material history through the formation of a photographic-permaculture. Such experiments include the development of a compost-based processing technique doubled as garden fertiliser. These images are the outcome of cross-species exchange 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-pollination between scholars, scientists, artists, communities, and non-human beings to reconfigure methods of earthly co-living and co-making.

In 2022 Jade won the Standish & Co Scholarship to undertake her MFA at the National Art School, completing the degree in 2023 with a near sell-out exhibition. Her postgraduate work was acquired by the National Art School archive, an archive of only 7000 works dating back to 1920, and the City of Sydney for their contemporary art collection. The collection, which boasts the work of some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists like Tamara Dean and Christian Thompson, is displayed in the City of Sydney Town Hall buildings as a permanent archive. Recent achievements include being a finalist in the 2022 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize held at the Museum of Australian Photography (formally the Monash Gallery of Art) in VIC, receiving the Joel Corrigan Memorial Photography Award (2022), and the Prix Yves Hernot Photography Award (2023).