Sam Wills​​

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Artist Statement ​

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Bureaucratic and legal systems form a primary material within my work, interventions use civic infrastructure as both a site and medium for artworks to unfold and be encountered. Work frequently investigates, disrupts and redirects the mechanics of collective memory, its links to mythologised national narratives and the private management of public space.  

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Work is less concerned with the primary interaction or object than with constructing the conditions for a delayed encounter to take place in an undetermined future, or with the chain of events an intervention sets into motion. Projects are often conceived to operate beyond my direct involvement, sometimes functioning as dormant agents activated by external variables or embedded within my personhood to be revealed through social or administrative situations.

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By working from within the systems that organise public life, I am interested in how artistic gestures can infiltrate areas of political debate that are usually closed to the public. Rather than working through depiction or representation, my practice seeks to redirect these systems from within, opening space for alternative ways of imagining the past, present and future.

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Education​

​Goldsmiths, University of London (Art and Politics MA, 2023- 2025)

Chelsea College Of Art (BA Fine Art, First Class Honours, 2016-2019) 

Camberwell College Of Art (Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, 2015-2016) 

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Public Commission

​2023 - 2024 Desire Paths, Public Realm, commissioned by Turf Projects, Croydon, UK

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Shortlisted 

​2024 Bloomberg New Contemporaries

2024 Minus20degrees, Flachau, Austria

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Press

​2025

Financial Times, Does your garden need a Norman Foster bird feeder? Here.

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Selected Exhibitions​​

​2026

          Their war. The legacy of absence, Mons Memorial Museum, Belgium 

2025

Dwellings Rehomed, The Design Museum, London 

The Floor is Lava, BowArts, Shaftesbury Avenue, London ​

2024

Together and Apart, No format Gallery, London

2023

Desire Paths, Turf Projects, Croydon 

Allodium, 28 Devonshire Road, London

A Place Bears The Name, Tension Fine Art, London ​

2022   

Annual Open Exhibition 2022, Southwark Park Gallery, London 

Page Masters Zine Fair, South London Gallery, London

Multiplied, GALLERY GALLERY, Antwerp, Belgium 

Cave Summer Exhibition, Cave Gallery, London ​

2021 

Stuck in a timeloop, CheriHarari, Online 

Auntie-Freeze 2021, Cave Gallery, London 

2020   

30works30days, 12ø, Online Exhibition ​

2019   

Chelsea College of Art Degree Show 2019, Chelsea College of Art, London 

Interim Show, Chelsea College of Art, London 

2018   ​

Translations, Chelsea College of Art, London

Auntie-Freeze 2018, Cave Gallery, London

Bjork Baby, Chelsea College of Art, London

Common Ground, Kennington Park, London​

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Writing / Published In:

2025

 N.37 Transfiguration, Arts of the Working Class, Berlin

2022  

MNAN Zine, Metal Institute, UK, here

TIM Magazine #3, TIM Magazine, Antwerp

THE PAPER, Good Press, Glasgow

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