Sam Hodge, Every Contact Leaves a Trace at That House on Mare Street, Hackney, London E8, June 2023 – Possibly the second house ever built in Hackney, a great big Georgian Town House on Mare Street, although I imagine it would have been a country house back in 1697, which, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, is when it was built. The house has a rich history, amongst other things it was the Elizabeth Fry Women’s Refuge for a good many Victorian years, it was originally built for a rather dubious Tory MP (is there any other sort?), it became a drinking man’s club, the New Lansdowne Club, in the 1930s. We’ve been watching the building fall into the hands of several rather disrespectful property developers over the last few years, it looked like, at one point, well at several points actually, that a serious disservice was going to be done. Property developers aren’t famed for their considerations around this part of London, they’ve been happily ripping the soul of East London apart with no regard for the people or the history for the last twenty years or more. We’ve been watching all this from the Organ bunker just over the street from the big house. It looks like the positively imposing building might have  fallen into the right hands now, fingers are crossed, apparently part of it is to become a family home, part of it an art centre. The new owners appear to know and love the history, they, like me, get rather excited by the fragments of old wallpaper or the slightly dark spying room at the top on the stairs (you really do need to go check it out while you can, that spying room probably wasn’t so wonderful if you were one of the inhabitants during Elizabeth Fry’s time).

So the house appears to be in good hands now, the building is being restored, the serious work starts in September, right now the owners have invited a number of artists to work in the building, a number of art events are talking place during the summer before the serious work starts. The first event has a just opened, a show of paintings and prints from Sam Hodges alongside a room featuring some rather fine reactions to the building from Emily Tracy.

The work that Sam Hodges has on the walls is intriguing, it certainly feels right, the pieces made from brick dust are delicious before you learn that they are made with brick dust. The whole thing feels like the colours that might result from the natural dyes a textile artist might use; rust, red ochre, indigo, the work is beautiful, the marks, the packaging, almsot a celebration… 

Every Contact Leaves a Trace is the founding principle of forensic science that whenever two things come into contact, an exchange takes place. Matter tells tales, calling into question borders between things and the separation of humans from their environment.Over 325 years, the varied inhabitants of 195 Mare Street have left their traces on the fabric of the building, leaving it a beautiful, but battered patchwork. Within this patchwork, Sam Hodge will be placing prints and paintings that have emerged from her encounters with things found at the uncertain edges of England, the Thames shore, her own recycling bin and the old house itself.

The organic pieces work wonderfully within the raw stripped back rooms of the house, the peeled back brickwork, the exposed floor boards, indeed the marks that were made when the building was squatted a handful of years ago. Sam’s colours are just right, and you suspect they would be wherever the work was being shown. There’s a warmth here, an understanding, a need to investigate both marks left and the leaving of new marks that just works  

Walking along the coast path, Sam Hodge has left traces of her shoe soles, clothes fibres and a front tooth fragment (amongst other things) and has extracted a few things that caught her eye and brought them back to her studio. Coal pebbles, washed up on the Thames shore, those fossilised chunks of carboniferous forest, bought to fuel industrial London and dropped into the Thames while being unloaded from ship to dock; Ochres from eroding Devon cliffs formed from sediments settling in Permian deserts or deposited by glaciers in the last ice age; Bricks from the demolished back wall of 195 Mare Street and soot from its chimneys. These have been ground up into pigment and mixed with different mediums to make paint and inks. Sam Hodge is interested to see what materials can do to make their mark; watching complex patterns that resemble biological or geological systems emerge in paint as it reacts to physical forces like pressure, gravity or evaporation. She selects and sometimes combine these into biomorphic collages.

That is one of the many intriguing things about the House, and indeed the manner of the work Sam Hodge has hanging on the walls, her marks alongside the many marks already left. her not quite throwaway things alongside the things that have (or might have been) thrown away, the layers of peeling wallpaper, the fragments of photos from the fishing club (that was part of  the New Lansdowne Club period in the 1930s); the packaging that the artist has picked out of the recycling bins, the beauty of cardboard, of tea boxes, of footprints, the marks of life, the marks that life leaves, the colour of those lives… The ambiguous shapes up there in frames asking us to look at them properly as we never really would do when they were just holding holding our teabags. There’s some truly beautiful print work here, it goes beyond just being beautiful to look at though, there’s the questions the pieces throw back, the fragments, the full-bodied richness of the printmaking. Her work is simple, her work is complex, clever, not too clever though, it is far too easy for an artist to be too clever and in doing so failing to connect. This work is far from simple and this is the perfect first show for this born again space, this is just the right way to throw open the doors. And it all works perfectly alongside the pieces of Emily Tracy…

Now Emily Tracy‘s work really is powerful, her interpretations, her obvious fascination with that peeling wallpaper and fragmented paint, the layers, the natural frames,  her walls are really special, looking through the door frame to see them is thrilling. Her room feels exciting to be in, to carefully spin around in as something else demands the attention of the corner of your eye, What Emily Tracy has done here is just right, this is genuinely rewarding, dare I say exciting without sounding like I’m getting a little too excited about torn wallpaper and peeling paint in some old house in Hackney?  both artists are highly recommended. (sw)

The Sam Hodge exhibition and Emily Tracy‘s room at That House on Mare Street can be found at 195 Mare Street, Hackney, E8 3QE. The space opens again on Thursday 8th and runs until Sunday 11th June. The weekend also features the E8 Art and Craft Trail, where fifteen artists including Sam and Emily will be showing work in the rooms of the house. Expect art on walls, art and craft on stalls, more details here.              

Links: Sam Hodge / Emily Tracy / www.e8artandcrafttrail.co.uk / www.195marestreet.co.uk

As always, do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show.