Katinka Samuel’s work responds to forms of the natural world and archival or historical sources to forge points of connection within a contemporary narrative. Her paintings relocate objects and moments found within the everyday, merging past and present into newly constructed fictionalised worlds which explore liminal, in-between places and reflect a sense of ephemeral and fleeting memory.

Her compositions are inhabited by sites and vessels such as windmills, boats and lanterns or dried insects and washed up objects, these abandoned and empty sites consider how husks and remnants of the past can serve as symbols of change and decay.

This series of paintings explores different forms of discarded husks as objects or symbols, looking at carcasses in the form of dead insects, dried leaves, abandoned buildings and forgotten figures, the paintings situating these forms as sites of memory between past and present.

Katinka Samuel (b.2000 London) is an Australian/English artist based in Naarm, Melbourne. She holds a BFA from RMIT and participated in an artist residency at Prisma Estudio, Lisbon in 2025. Recent exhibitions include Windmills which don’t spin, lanterns that don’t burn, 138 Gallery, Melbourne, Small Teeth, Big Feelings, Prisma Estudio, Lisbon and Bone-houses, Limbs and Other Parts, Brunswick St Gallery, Melbourne.