Samantha Everton: THIRTEEN

At the intersection of fantasy and critique, Samantha Everton’s photographs transform childhood wonder into a theatrical stage upon which the anxieties of contemporary life unfold. In her new body of work, ‘THIRTEEN’, Everton creates a poetic meditation on the epidemic of excess inherited by the next generation. Surreal tableaux unfold within nostalgic domestic interiors, where children encounter worlds overflowing with spectacle – objects of desire, abundance, and unease. Beneath their visual splendour lies a deeper interrogation of inheritance: what does it mean to come of age within a culture defined by insatiable consumption?

“They are witness and participant,” reflects Everton of her adolescent subjects, “As much as they understand, they cannot separate themselves from the dominant legacy.” The children are both conscious of and complicit in the culture of consumption, echoing Guy Debord’s critique of the “Society of the Spectacle”. In Suite of Desires, a girl sits silently before an altar of abundance, surrounded by a grotesque yet resplendent feast – a trope of temptation. Watched over by omniscient eyes (ironically crafted from fondant) she embodies a quiet pathos: aware of her own plight, yet unable to resist the world.

Everton began photographing this series when her own daughter was thirteen, a formative age that signifies, for the artist, a generational coming of age. Profoundly personal yet culturally resonant, the works ask what it means for young people to inherit a world where beauty, excess, and desire shape everyday experience. Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality comes into focus as Everton’s subjects confront a glittering glut of artificial seduction, where cakes melt impossibly, jewels encrust ordinary objects, and childhood symbols swell into uncanny forms.

A girl sits surrounded by rare and exotic objects in Parlour of Wonders, a work that explores how identity is constructed and perpetuated through material possessions. Wearing cat ears, oversized boots, and a fluffy pink garment, she appears to have become part of the collection itself – an object of possession, and parade. This image exists on the edge of transformation: a ghostly breeze enters the room moments before her bubblegum will burst, suspending her between innocence and disruption. Resting on her lap is the rare Golden Shouldered Parrot, encircled by kittens that, despite their softness, assume the role of predators. This tension between beauty and threat, rarity and vulnerability, reveals the fragility of the worlds we construct around ourselves.

Everton’s photographs collapse the distinction between the real and the simulated, evoking the philosophical notion of simulacra and simulation. Each image is meticulously staged and captured in-camera, emerging from actual worlds created through props, lighting, people, and a carefully realised vision. In this way, the photographs critique mass production through extraordinary acts of individual making. The artist describes her process as “living and breathing the ideas”: beginning with notebooks, sketches, and collages, her concepts gradually expand into elaborate environments. For ‘THIRTEEN’, her bedroom walls became covered with visual studies, printed material, colours, and forms that she continually revised. Everton recalls how she would wake up, leap out of bed and scribble notes on the walls.

Every object in her fantastical settings is created, collected, or commissioned, with artisans ranging from cake makers to set designers. On set, subjects are choreographed within finely constructed mise-en-scènes resembling both monumental still lifes and cinematic sets, requiring up to seventeen consecutive hours to assemble. Nothing is incidental – from the particular placement of pancakes to the artificial “daylight” created by numerous lights at midnight. These acts of fabrication become conceptually significant, revealing the constructed nature of the realities we inhabit.

Despite this precision, Everton describes her process as “organised spontaneity” – permeable to play, improvisation, and discovery. In Curated Wilderness, for example, she only realised the wall needed stripes after assembling the scene, prompting her team to spend three hours painting it. Her images are less composed than cultivated, growing in the fertile space between control and chance.

Everton is, ultimately, a storyteller. Her scenes draw from the visual language of fantasy and fairy tale, yet beneath their glossy surfaces lie darker reflections on identity, desire, and transformation. Like a nursery rhyme, her photographs disguise complex ideas beneath whimsy and humour. In Curated Wilderness, featuring Everton’s own daughter, the girl appears to merge with the black swan draped over her head, blurring the boundary between costume and body. The swan’s wings are spread, caught between captivity and flight; just as the girl is frozen in a body of transforming feathers – a transitional age in an accelerating society, caught at the crossroads of innocence and becoming.

The final work in this series, Field of Devotion, acts as a pause – a deep breath – amidst Everton’s sharp social critiques. Towering paper flowers bloom beside an ancient tree whose shadows evokes both sanctuary and uncertainty. Nature is carefully staged yet quietly sacred. The girl's luminous lungs filled with flowers suggest the natural world is not only around us but within us – fragile, essential. The artist proposes an alternative ontological currency grounded not in possession, but in wonder, vulnerability and the living world. There is hope, here – a reminder of life, and beauty, beyond the economies of desire.

As we traverse Everton’s theatrical worlds, childhood fantasy morphs into a philosophical meditation on identity, desire, and inheritance. ‘THIRTEEN’ reveals the fragile boundary between spectacle and reality, where beauty enchants, desire ensnares, and the worlds we construct ultimately begin to construct us.

Elli Walsh