Artists name: Samantha Clark (Orkney)    Eddy

Orkney, Summer 2020. The numbers of the dead are announced daily. Lockdown eases. Others move. I do not. My home is surrounded by water. To one side is a freshwater loch, to the other, a fast-flowing burn which gushes through a fish ladder and on to meet the North Atlantic, visible a mile or so to the west. The loch is the centre of my small world. Every day, I watch the water. I try to see it properly, to understand it. The strangeness of it. Its ancientness, each molecule cycling through billions of years. Its freshness every moment. Its lightness. Mists, fogs and rain. Its massive weight, gathering everything down into itself. Its patience, dissolving mountains to dust, percolating bedrock. Its particularity. This water. I stay still and watch it move. I try to learn its many names. And then I write them down.

Samantha Clark is a writer and visual artist based in Orkney. She was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2018, a Cove Park Emerging Writers Award and a Society of Authors Grant in 2020, and in 2021 received the RSA William Littlejohn Award. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. Her artwork has been widely exhibited and she has received public art commissions for several hospitals and schools, most recently a 30-metre mural for the Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall completed in 2019. Her first book “The Clearing” , a memoir of the spaces between and what may be learned in them, was published by Little, Brown in March 2020. https://linktr.ee/SamClarkartwrite