Artist Profile: Margarita Sampson
’A new blue dress with white daisies, the roar of the DC4, a speck in the ocean that was going to be my new home’’
Artist Margarita Sampson vividly remembers coming to Norfolk in 1975 with her parents and sister when she was aged 5. It was an idyllic childhood of bare feet, cubbies in the bush and long days down at the beach, poking around on the reef; all of which later informed her work as an award-winning sculptor and jeweller.
After growing up on Norfolk, Margarita attended the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, studying painting, jewellery and ceramics. Finding painting unfulfilling, she soon turned to soft sculpture, the better to express her delight in the soft underwater forms of the oceans and reefs of her childhood. Her first ever sculptural work in 1997 was made in response to a callout for the first Sculpture by the Sea (SxSea) and helped advertise the Sydney Olympics. Her second sculptural work won the ‘People’s Choice Prize’ at SxSea the following year. After exhibiting with them over 15 times, this year Margarita is on the Sculpture by the Sea curatorial panel. Other textile works won awards including Waterhouse Natural History Prize and have been exhibited widely including the Art Gallery of NSW, The Australian Design Centre and in the USA, Europe, New Zealand and the Pacific.
After living in Europe for a number of years, Margarita and her partner, Bugs (also from Norfolk and an island family), started to feel the call of the ocean again, and of island life. “We came back to Norfolk in 2001, and I thought, oh, it’s going to be hard to make sculpture from here, but if I scale it down I can make jewellery, it’s tiny sculptures. I had to relearn soldering from scratch, and that was before online tutorials, so I just had to stick with it, it took a week of failing miserably before I could do it properly.” In 2009 Margarita applied for a Churchill Fellowship to develop a line of jewellery reflecting island culture and nature. That fellowship provided her with several weeks of intense one-on-one tuition from senior Australian teachers and then internships in France with contemporary jewellers.
“From that, the technique which really caught my imagination was lost-wax casting, so I could do a direct cast of, say, a pine needle, cast it into wax and then mould that into a ring, for instance. Part of living on Norfolk, and of island identity, is a deep resonance with nature, the tides, the phase of the moon, and I thought if I really respond to the curve of seashell, then other people are going to find that reflects their love of nature as well.’’
Margarita goes on to say, “what I really wanted to make was jewellery that helped Norfolk express itself to itself, if you know what I mean. The Norfolk plait, for instance, it’s a very powerful symbol of home, so when it becomes a ring it’s something enduring that we can give to loved ones. I’m so humbled and grateful that people have used the Norfolk plait ring to celebrate graduating, for birthdays, to ask some-one to marry them, and to exchange in wedding ceremonies. As a maker, to have something that you’ve personally created be part of people’s lives at such significant moments is very profound and moving.’’
During a more recent off-island stint, Margarita asked her partner, Bugs, if he would like a ring with the island motto ‘Inasmuch’ engraved upon it, and to her surprise, his eyes suddenly welled up with tears. “I guessed that was a yes. Then I asked his brothers and family and they said yes, so I started making them for other people as well. The motto ‘Inasmuch’ holds so much in it, it speaks of hospitality, of looking after the stranger, of reciprocity and kindness and these days, of island sovereignty and holding fast. The Norfolk way of life is very precious and we need to stand firm to make sure we don’t lose it.’’
Today, Margarita is back again and hand-making work in her island studio, nestled in thick forest at the edge of the National Park. Green parrots, grinnels and robins flit about outside her window, and inside, scattered across her chunky wooden work-bench are tiny carved terns, cast shells, coral branches, pine needles and sea urchins, while lying nearby are stamps and hammers for inscribing phrases from the Norf’k language onto pieces. ‘’I’m creating new, more mythic work at the moment, it’s based on some of the imagery from old convict headstones, there’s a skull and crossbones and a flying angel with a trumpet… and a nice fat mermaid for no real reason at all, except I wanted to bring her to life. Oh, maybe it’s because I wanted to be one, back when I was a little girl swimming in Emily Bay with my sister and our friends…” A human/fish hybrid? Sounds just about right.
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Margarita’s work can be found stocked at Gallery Guava, online at: www.margaritasampson.com (where you can also take a peek at her decades of sculptural work) and at the Norfolk Island Tourist Bureau.
