Sam Jinks developed a talent for drawing and constructing his ideas alongside his father, a Melbourne cabinetmaker. Jinks worked as an illustrator before turning to sculpture. He worked in film and television special effects before becoming a fabricator for artist Patricia Piccinini. For the last ten years he has sculpted independently, working in silicone, fiberglass, resin and hair – human, animal and synthetic. His work was shown at Art Stage Singapore, and in Personal Structures (2013), a collateral event of the 55th Venice Biennale. Jinks’s work is held in Australian and international public collections including Kiran Nader Museum of Art, Dehli, India and the Museo Escultura Figurativa Internacional Contemporaenea (MEFIC), Portugal, RMIT and McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park. When Jinks’s first solo exhibition Body in Time toured to regional venues in 2012, the people of Shepparton raised funds to purchase the sculpture Woman and Child for the Shepparton Art Museum. Jinks’s work has recently been displayed at the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection in Frankfurt, Germany and Hanover, Germany. His Standing Pietà (2014) was shown at Art Basel, Hong Kong and Marc Straus in New York. In late 2015, Jinks’s work toured to the Daejeong Museum, South Korea.
Purchased 2015
© Sam Jinks
DIVIDE (SELF PORTRAIT), 2011 by Sam Jinks. Sam Jinks’ self-portrait is a 3-dimensional oversized head measuring 86 cm by 60 cm with a depth of 66 cm.
The sculpture is made from silicone, fiberglass, resin and hair, both human, animal and synthetic which gives the self-portrait a striking hyper-realism. The head is without a neck and is sliced cleanly at a sloping angle from the top of his forehead to above his ear.
The head is attached directly onto the gallery wall for support; a white metal rod connects to the rear and interior of the head so that the head projects outward, appearing to float. In doing so the sculpture creates various shadows of itself against the white wall.
The front of Jinks’ face is a long oval shape. It is also divided vertically into two halves along the centre of his head and face. A fleshy and hair-covered half on the left and the exposed underlying skull on the right.
The left half of his face has shiny pink skin blended with areas of shadow, and subtle changes in tone around his eye socket, nose and mouth.
On this side, unevenly cut short black hair is sprinkled with grey and grows around his tucked-back ear but not across his otherwise bald forehead. A few wrinkle lines run across his forehead while a large z-shaped scar zig zags across the side of his forehead and above the tapering edge of his eyebrow. His eyebrow is thick and dark and arched low over his heavily lidded hazel-coloured eye. Jinks looks forward without an obvious focus.
Open pores drift down and around his prominent and slightly hooked nose. His groomed moustache continues a short goatee-like beard. A sideburn frames his jaw and grows around to under his bottom lip. Jinks’ neutral expression is reinforced by his passive straight mouth, his pinkish-red lower lip protrudes slightly forward of his thin upper lip.
On the right half of his face, Jinks’ exposed skull is a uniform pale cream colour. The bone is pitted, coarse in some areas and smooth in others. There are vein-like fracture lines at the side of the skull and knobbly edges to the slopping sunken eye socket and cheek bone which recedes sharply above his jaw. Under his eye socket there is a half triangular cavity where his nose would project. From there the bone flutes down to his mouth where his teeth emerge, upper and lower in an uninterrupted line. The slightly clenched teeth are regular and proverbially long with bone showing above and below the enamel. The jaw hangs off the rest of the skull; it is hinged from under the socket where his ear would emerge.
Audio description written and voiced by Annette Twyman
Sam Jinks (age 38 in 2011)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Sam Jinks on hyper realism and his motivations.
Eye to Eye is a summer Portrait Gallery Collection remix arranged by degree of eye contact – from turned away with eyes closed all the way through to right-back-at-you – as we explore artists’ and subjects’ choices around the direction of the gaze.
