(He / Him)

Hut (They Say They Live Here). 2025

archival pigment print.

Hut (They Say They Live Here)  is a scene constructed of pine, bracken and gorse, resulting as an amalgamation of two distinct but equally important practices, my art practice and my desire to play in forests . Utilising the pine forest landscape so often seen bordering rural towns of the Central North Island, there are inherent connotations to a haunted post colonial land tied to this scene. Once fertile soil, now acidic and stripped of its native flora hosts a ghoulish tree hut, elevating the discarded borderlands of small towns into something otherworldly.

Samuel Scully is a Te Whanganui a Tara based artist who creates photographs synthesized out of the discourse between his inner abstractions of the world and the observable patterns of being present in the everyday.

Samuel works in the expanded tradition of contemporary documentary photography. Specifically his practice engages with lyrical themes of documentary that seek to disrupt or reinterpret the everyday patterns of being that emerge within small and often rural communities of Aotearoa. Samuel  uses the interplay of subject and perspective to create long form photographic projects that manifest in poetically descriptive imagery analogous to life.