Pressure, Light, Fire by Daniele Sambo

NHS Lothian Charity: Tonic Arts are excited to bring Daniele Sambo’s beautiful, personal and thought-provoking artwork to the Hospital Exhibitions Programme following its successful run at the Glasgow School of Art’s Garnethill Gallery.

The exhibition consists of a series of blind embossings on paper, photograms and small terracotta sculptures created using tidewrack (manmade marine debris) collected on the Scottish coastline and made during a residency at Hospitalfield. The precarious nature of our coastal habitats mirrors the fragility of our bodies.

This work is responding to a lexicon learned in the past four years, following Sambo’s own diagnosis and subsequent recovery from a rare congenital illness. Pressure, light and fire refers to the conditions required to make elements of the work. These
embossings were made by pressure on paper and clay to draw a parallel with the imbalances in CSF (cerebral spinal fluid) liquid pressure inside the dura mater and brain.

The decision to work with blind embossing, without using ink, was a conscious attempt to introduce the idea of a dormant syndrome or invisible illness. The photograms created in the darkroom are suggestive of x-rays, MRIs and other medical imaging. Pit firing the terracotta clay makes use of the fire and like in an hospital incinerator, the materials burn and disappear forever. They leave a scar-like mark on the clay surface, a reminder of their passage.

The artworks that Sambo is presenting are all using light either in the process of creation (fire pit and the bulb of an enlarger), or in the case of the blind embossing it is the lights and shadows on the creases of the paper that allow the embossing to become visible. The resulting prints and artefacts have been created using a process inspired by medical and geological museum displays and archives.

Daniele Sambo is a visual artist from Venice, Italy, living and working in Glasgow. His work often uses specific elements and material qualities found in the landscape and responds to it using primarily photography and prints. Sambo undertook
an interdisciplinary residency at Hospitalfield, Arbroath, in October 2024, which offered an opportunity to create this new body of work that reflected upon the fragile nature of health and well-being.