A&D ANNUAL 2021

Sam Syme

Sam Syme’s work is predominantly concerned with childhood and how our past informs our present identity. She primarily utilises moving image and hybrid performance processes in an attempt at personal healing and to establish freeform storytelling. Her earlier works within her course of study have concerned themselves with memory, specifically family memory and the spaces in which it is mediated and constructed. She is further interested in nostalgia, and the various ways it can attach itself through childhood, family, television, and music. Her focus this year has been to create a liminal space and body of work conducive in exploring potentially taboo topics such as childhood trauma. Her final work is a rumination on the period spent as an 'emerging adult' and the opportunity it holds in understanding our past. The emerging adult is a term used to describe a transitional state where one is neither an adult nor an adolescent, and yet, somehow, is also both. This transitory time is investigated through combining children’s television shows with adult content, and practices of hybrid puppetry performance to represent this liminal and paradoxical time of change.