Samantha Lippett

 

Samantha Lippett graduated with first class honours in Illustration from Brighton University. Having completed her degree, Lippett felt that Illustration in its most fundamental form wasn’t particularly well suited to her. As a result she has since pursued a career in curating and has most recently graduated from Goldsmiths University with a masters in the subject.

Her final piece for her degree was a video cut from YouTube films of women having home births in the states, publicly shared to the internet as part of a body ownership movement. She creatively layered parts of the clips with captions of comments made by men using the videos as pornographic material. After completing it, which required hours of research and trawling through gross material, she then uploaded it to the internet with appropriate tags the men had been using to find the videos in the first place. Her film was removed by YouTubedue to ‘inappropriate content.’

Samantha is a very well accomplished 24 year old. Straight out of University she took on an internship with the Birth Rites Collection that took her to New Mexico to work with Native Midwives and explore their perspective of birth. After a year with the Manchester based Collection she began to feel under appreciated by the director, and felt she was getting little credit for her work. She spoke a lot in the talk of how important it is to be happy where you are working, and to be proud of what you are doing. Whilst she didn’t regret her work with the collection she felt strongly that 2014 was the right time for her to move on.

After this Samantha undertook her masters at Goldsmiths. She has organised various symposiums since then for professionals to discuss maternity and representations of pregnancy in art. I personally have a particular interest in ideas of maternity and so found her talk incredibly engaging. Samantha gave us lots of advice and emphasised the importance of gaining consent when creating film pieces. However she also talked of how after a few years she made the decision to move on from looking at pregnancy in her work as she didn’t want to pigeonhole herself in to a box category.

On the back of this lecture I want to look into some of the Artists Samantha recommended, including Kiki Smith and Mary Kelly. I thoroughly enjoyed her visit and look forward to following her and her future works.