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

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

Having suffered from Agoraphobia for most of their life, Sam uses painting as a place to explore a complex relationship with open space in the landscape. Typically working with oil on canvas, the pieces are often vivid, expressive and cathartic, seeking the extreme contrasts of light and dark, movement and stillness, abstraction and realism. The canvases are generally dominated by vast skies, and are devoid of figures, houses, fences or other man made structures. The work ranges from large scale immersive pieces, to smaller intimate works, layering repeatedly with thin washes of oil paint. Sam has been particularly inspired by the East Anglian Fens where they grew up, and by artists such as Turner, George Shaw, Johnny Defeo, Nat Young and Jack Davis.

Sam is presently working on a body of skyscapes for a solo show in 2025.

Landscape and themes around Agoraphobia also feature heavily in Sam's writing. In 2019 Sam won the Escalator Award for emerging writers at The National Centre for Writing, and since then they were longlisted for the UEA New Forms Award and Exeter Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Award, as well as being published in various magazines and anthologies such as New Writing, Cold Lips, Thin Noon, Funhouse, Potluck, Egg Box and BSSP anthology.

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