Upon the stage of the still life painting, Samantha poses compositions that play with, or pull at, things like domesticity (though not) and latent (potent) sexual innuendo. There is a sense of life’s flux and shift in some of the paintings: of tumbled glass tumblers mocked by tipped toy chairs, which in a way is an account of the artist’s own life-flux.

In incorporating miniature objects into compositions with everyday objects, Samantha mucks around with scale in measured tempo. For instance, a plastic tiger prowls the tabletop beside a teaspoon and a jewelry box, or a dolls’ house tea chest is dwarfed by a standard milk jug. What is she doing this for?

Samantha says: “The scales of the objects are often altered to create different, sometimes unsettling relationships. The small objects are ones I’ve carried with me since childhood, while their juxtaposition with the everyday in some way represents the changes that have occurred in recent times – the death of my father, the birth of my child, and a full committed relationship…”

Still life paintings are assertively mild. They are unapologetically un-radical and yet they are somehow powerful contained spaces. It may not immediately appear as such, but still life paintings have always been gutsy, forever laden with meaning well beyond the subject matter. Still life paintings can appear to brew – they might swell with the flesh of a cut fig or they might recall mortality and fertility with a browning banana in the midst of decay.

There is an undercurrent of subtle discordance in Samantha’s new still life paintings: with perception and perspective, a distortion of edges and boundaries. There is a struggle with aesthetics, with the actual meaning of beauty, and the reign supreme of nature.

Samantha acknowledges finding inspiration from Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin’s still life paintings, with their strength and transcendent, rigorous beauty. She found a certain modernism in the way he placed the subjects - creating a focus for beyond and directing the gaze. Other references include Jean-Etienne Liotard, Sebastian Stoskopff and Henri-Horace Delapurte.

Samantha is also in a group portraiture show Courtroom Faces opening Friday 10th March in the Supreme Courts, Macquarie Street Sydney.

Contact Rushcutters Bay Gallery on 02 9361 5413 for further details.