Kim Ah Sam
It’s as if the surface of the land has a type of skin, and the land has rivers just like arteries and veins of the body. My sculptural weavings flow in the same way as the rivers interlace Country, or the veins run through the body allowing movement.”
— Kim Ah Sam
Kim Ah Sam is a proud Kuku Yalanji and Kalkadoon woman who was born and raised in Queensland. As a mature-aged woman, Kim decided to follow her dream to go to university; in 2017, Kim completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art and continued to complete her Fine Art Honours at Griffith University Queensland College of Art in 2018, majoring in printmaking.
Kim’s printmaking and sculpture is based around her cultural and spiritual identity. An abiding theme of her art practice is investigating ways of spiritually reconnecting with the people and land of her father’s Country (Kalkadoon) and her grandmother’s Country (Kuku Yalanji). Kim expresses this reconnection in diverse ways – by representing landscape, or ‘Country’, through rigorous, cross-disciplinary experimentation in a variety of media, including handmade papermaking, print and sculpture.
Responding to how traditional and European materials can be integrated, processes are fundamental to Kim’s conceptual articulation, developing various methods of working that show how the old and the new can combine in a contemporary context. Kim presents the symbiotic relationship between practice and theory by pulping and repurposing her assignments, course outlines, research documentation, power points and personal documents.
Kim’s weaving practice is entirely self-taught, embodying storytelling and knowledge-sharing through unique sculptural forms which examine the landscape’s relationship with the body. Her work explores weaving as a therapeutic practice towards a process of cultural healing and a way to address feelings of disconnection and reconnection with her Country.
