Samantha Wickman: MATCHES IN THE DARK at the LaunchPad Gallery

Samantha Wickman’s Matches in the Dark is a collection of figurative porcelain sculpture that draws heavily from personal experience.  The sculptures are a sustained meditation on what happens to people when they fall from the realm of the living into the kingdom of the sick by way of chronic pain and illness.  Lacking means of ascent, the shadow beings depicted in these pieces float unhinged from the earthly world, desperately creating an existence from the flotsam and jetsam of ruin and disease. They exist, in all their flaws, lighting matches in a sea of darkness, proof that life in the kingdom of the sick exists, and that there is both beauty and meaning amidst the chaos.