Sam Llewellyn-Jones’ multifaceted practice interrogates both the act and arc of painting. Often starting with a photographic image, which he has already and very deliberately distorted in the dark room, Llewellyn-Jones creates paintings that ebb and flow between mark and memory, image and index, pressure and print. The result are gloriously ghostly abstractions that, over time, reveal the secrets of their silver-gelatine past whilst remaining resolutely and beautifully painterly as surfaces. Alongside these whippy grisailles Llewellyn-Jones also creates larger, more colourful abstract paintings which, to all intents and purposes, function as collaborations between the artist and his source; between object(ivity) and subject(ivity); between craft and chance. These are the result of the artist taking sheets of linen and placing them over rocks. He then rubs paint on the linen over those rocks to create a direct impression of its form and surface, but which is denied any further reality by the orchestration of Llewellyn-Jones’ composition. Quotations of the source commingle together in mosaics of colour to evince cordate forms which, coupled with the romantic palette he employs, invests his primordial ground with a veneer of sensitivity. The artist thus records the fact of matter whilst simultaneously evincing the matter of its fact as a painting, object, performance, gesture or process. Ground – or land – hovering in that space between invention and association, issuing a (literal) geology of mark making that sets up poignant conversations between states earthly and ethereal, then and now, and their undeniable alliance.