Sam Hacking is an artist and writer with a BA Hons in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art and an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from The University of East Anglia.

Sam has widely exhibited, with highlights including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Creekside Studios, Mol’s Place Gallery, Ravens Row Gallery, 176 Gallery, Hampstead Affordable Art Fair, Yare Gallery, Parndon Mill Gallery and Conversations with Artists.

Having suffered from Agoraphobia all her life and being house bound at one point, Sam paints the spaces that cause her both a sense of longing and a sense of fear. The sky in her paintings, with its ever expanding nature, creates vulnerability, while the light and landscape of clouds gives a sense of containment and beauty, ultimately turning the anxiety into reverence. Sam tends to paint multiple layers of thin washes of oils and plays with suspending the image between representational and complete abstraction. She has been particularly inspired by the East Anglian Fens where she grew up, and by artists such as Turner, George Shaw, Johnny Defeo, Poogy Bjerklie and Jack Davis.

Sam is presently working on a body of skyscapes for a solo show in 2026.

Landscape and mental health also features heavily in Sam's writing. In 2019 Sam won the Escalator Award for emerging writers at The National Centre for Writing in Norwich and went on to do an MA in Creative Writing at The University of East Anglia. Her work has been published in several magazines and anthologies such as New Writing, Cold Lips, Thin Noon, Funhouse and Potluck, as well as being longlisted for the UEA New Forms Award and Exeter Short Story Prize in 2021, Shortlisted for Bristol Short Story Prize in 2023 & Longlisted for Bath Short Story Award in 2025.

Sam is also working on a collection of shorts and a novel.