“When you finally strip yourself of your hobbies, and career, and friends, and family, and all those things that help us escape; will you finally realise it is our very deep and unfathomable feelings that make us most human — and everything else around us is just another way to cope.”

— Sammy Lea

A woman sitting on a wooden deck, painting or drawing on a large sheet of paper with art supplies around her, outdoors near a house with a brick wall and a window.

A person dressed in a blue top and white pants standing indoors, partially covering their face with their hand, with a tattoo on their arm and long wavy hair.

A person sitting on the beach hugging their knees with their head down, facing away from the camera, in a black and white photo.

Sammy Lea creates from feeling — intuitive, raw, and steeped in emotion. Her hometown is Melbourne, but she is often moving, seeking and chasing meaning in this great unknown. A multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, and writing poetry, her practice explores the spaces between vulnerability, embodiment, and the unspoken stories we carry.

At the heart of Sammy’s work is the belief that “it is our unfathomable feelings that make us most human.” Her art becomes a language for what she cannot always name in words: a vessel for ache, tenderness, longing, and release. In expressing these emotions visually and through language, she invites others to meet themselves in the in-between — to feel seen in the things they may not have known they were feeling.

She often paints bodies - not to sexualise, but to humanise. Through form, softness, and distortion, she reclaims the body as a side of story, memory, and quiet power. Her figures are tender and unresolved, more about what’s felt then what’s shown — resisting objectification and instead asking to be understood.

Sammy’s work isn’t about perfection — it’s about presence. It’s about honouring the parts of ourselves that are messy, raw, and still becoming. She crates with the hope that her pieces act as mirrors: soft places for others to land, to remember that feeling deeply is not a flaw but a form of truth. In a world that often rushes to define and simplify, her practice holds space for what is complex, slow, and sacred.

She believes that art has the power to soften us — to disarm the protective layers and invite us back into our own skin. Sammy offers a quiet permission to be human it all its contradictions.

She doesn’t claim to have the answers — only a deep desire to keep asking, feeling, and creating from the heart. Her work us an ongoing conversation between what’s visible and what’s hidden, what’s said and what’s sensed. Whether through paint, pencil, or poetry, she’s always chasing the truth of a moment — not to capture it, but to honour it. And if her art leaves you with even a flicker of recognition, softness, or breath — then it’s done what it came here to do.

Because at its core, her practice isn’t about the finished product — it’s about connection. A quiet exchange between maker and viewer, a shared moment of pause in a world that rarely lets us feel deeply. Sammy hopes her work offers a kind of companionship — a reminder that you’re not alone in the chaos, the beauty, the ache of being alive. That somewhere, in colour and shape and wordless form, your experience is mirrored, and held.

In the end, her work is simply an offering: a hand extended in the dark, saying I feel it too.