Samantha Clark is a visual artist and writer based in Orkney. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, has an MA in Environmental Philosophy from UCLAN and gained a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews in 2017. She has exhibited widely and carried out numerous public art commissions and residencies, most recently a 30 mural commission for the new Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall. Her first book The Clearing: A Memoir of Art, Family and Mental Health, published by Little, Brown in 2020, follows the process of clearing and selling the family home after the death of both of her parents. Threaded through with insights drawn from classical and scientific ways of understanding empty space, theories of ether, light, radio waves, dark matter, and from the contemplative space offered by art, The Clearing considers what we must do with the things we cannot know, change or control.