Three Paintings Selected for Fringe Arts Bath 2026
I’m really excited to share that three of my paintings have been selected for this year’s Fringe Arts Bath Festival . My work will form part of the exhibition titled ‘The 2020s: Sacred Brands and Disposable Gods, Presented with Limited Ad Interruptions’, curated by Roxanne Darby.
The exhibition I’m in will be staged at Newark Works as part of the wider FaB Festival, which runs from 22nd May to 6th June 2026. FaB transforms venues across Bath into spaces for exhibitions, performances, and installations. If you’re visiting Fringe Arts Bath this year, I’d really recommend spending time exploring multiple venues across the city. The map of all locations can be found here.
The venue that will be housing Sam’s artwork for the duration of the festival
The exhibition itself has such a brilliant concept… Rather than presenting artworks in a traditional contemporary art format, the exhibition imagines itself as a future history exhibit looking back at our current decade. The works are framed as cultural artefacts from the 2020s, interpreted by future historians attempting to make sense of our strange habits, contradictions, and collapsing priorities.
It gave me the chance to completely reimagine how my paintings are discussed and understood (or misunderstood). The three pieces I’ll be exhibiting are ‘King of the Chips’, ‘Seagull Sundae’, and ‘The Sardine Sentinel’, all paintings that explore the overlap between wildlife and human culture through coastal birds interacting with processed food, packaging, and consumer debris.
Normally, I talk about these works through the lens of human-wildlife interaction, climate anxiety, adaptation, and the increasingly blurred boundary between nature and the built environment. But for this exhibition, the texts accompanying the paintings have been humourously rewritten as though they are historical records from the distant future:
Suddenly, gulls stealing chips are no longer cheeky seaside encounters, but evidence of ancient feeding rituals. Melting ice creams become symbols of climate instability and seasonal heatwaves. Puffins perched on sardine tins are interpreted as domesticated animals lovingly provided with canned fish by benevolent humans, despite the tiny inconvenient detail that puffins became extinct shortly afterwards… The satire works because it never strays too far from reality.
The festival opens with the Opening Night Private View/ Arty Party, held on Friday 22nd May. If you do visit, come and say hello. I’ll be the one defending the historical importance of gulls eating ice cream.
Opening Night Arty Party Venues
Newark Works, 2 Foundry Lane, Bath BA2 3DZ (where I will most likely be for the Arty Party)
44AD Artspace, 4 Abbey Street, Bath BA1 1NN
The Artpad, 62 Great Pulteney St, Bath BA2 4DN
Old Glassworks, 105–107 Walcot Street, Bath BA1 5BW
