Sam Gold’s work begins through the politics of touch, where skin meets material and how the impact of pressure leaves a mark. Working across ceramics and expanded sculpture, Gold considers the politics of touch, bodily knowledge, queer ecologies and the ways materials and bodies are continually shaped through contact, pressure and care.
Sam Gold (they/them) is a trans non-binary contemporary artist living and working on Tarntanya, Kaurna Yarta. Represented by Hugo Michell Gallery and a JamFactory alum, Gold has developed a sculptural practice grounded in ceramics while increasingly moving across material, spatial and interdisciplinary forms. Clay remains central: a responsive body that yields, resists, records contact and makes visible the conditions under which it has been handled.
Gold comes from a multidisciplinary background spanning Furniture Design and Technology, Transpersonal Art Therapy and a degree in Contemporary Art. These intersecting fields have shaped an approach to sculpture that moves between material intelligence, embodied knowledge, behavioural observation and relational ways of making. Alongside their studio practice, Gold is a lecturer and mentor with more than a decade of experience teaching ceramics and contemporary arts practice. Teaching, mentorship and making operate as interconnected forms of knowledge: ways of paying attention to how materials and people respond, adapt and develop through relation.
Their forms are worked closely, coiled, pinched, stretched, pressed and altered through heat, allowing the behaviour of the material to participate in how each work arrives. Surfaces retain fingerprints, drag marks, pressure and residue. Through layered finishes and expanded approaches to ceramic sculpture, Gold creates bodily and geological terrains that move between membranes, bruising, mineral formations and shifting landscapes.
Research and residency have become important extensions of Gold’s evolving practice. In 2024, they undertook a residency with the South Australian Museum’s mineral archive, collaborating with mineralogists and developing cobalt glazes through site-responsive, non-extractive research. In 2025, this inquiry continued through a paid residency at The Pumphouse, Albury. Across these projects, material, land and environment are approached not simply as subjects, but as active participants in the making process.
Gold is a highly awarded artist, including the Wollongong Acquisitive Major Prize (2025). Their work is held in the collections of Wollongong Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Powerhouse Museum, Artbank and private collections. They have exhibited widely, including Primavera: Young Australian Artists 2021 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and are currently a tenant at Mixed Goods Studios.
Gold’s practice continues to expand beyond ceramics as a singular discipline toward sculpture as a field of relationships, between body and material, architecture and environment, softness and pressure, intimacy and resistance. Across these encounters, they remain interested in what materials can teach us about adaptation, interdependence and the intelligence of continual transition.