Eternal Return: A study in cycles

Image: Hyperreal sculptural artist Sam Jinks inspects his new work, Eternal Return. Photo: QVMAG.

There is a certain ambition in commissioning a spider. Not a symbolic one, not a decorative motif, but a large-scale, hyperreal spider – suspended, detailed, and impossible to ignore.

For Sam Jinks, Eternal Return wasn’t about provocation for its own sake. It emerged, instead, from familiarity, affection, and years of close observation.

“I’ve always loved spiders,” Sam says, without hesitation. “We have all spiders at home, and as the years go by, you see their whole life cycle. Little spiders appear in the backyard, and they'll get bigger – they have spiderlings themselves, and then they die.

“It’s such a strange process,” he reflects, “because it feels like it’s almost the same spider repeating its own cycle.” The life of the spider folds back on itself, season after season. Hence the title: Eternal Return.

Image: Sam Jinks' sculpture Eternal Return in progress. Photo: QVMAG.

One particular encounter lingered. Years ago, Sam remembers a spider that had become a familiar presence in the backyard – so familiar that it faded into the background of daily life. Until one day it didn’t. “I went into the kitchen and there it was,” he recalls, “on the table, on a magazine. It was so strange, so out of place.” Shortly after, the web disappeared. The spider was dying. “That was the end of its little cycle,” he says. “It just always struck me as amazing.”

Spiders had surfaced in Sam’s work before. He’d even made a sculpture years earlier – a spider hunched in sleep beside a racing car – but the moment had never felt quite right to fully pursue the form. “I’ve been sculpting spiders for years,” he says, “but never really been able to see it through.” Until now.

Image: Sam Jinks makes adjustments to Eternal Return. Photo: QVMAG.

The commission from QVMAG offered both opportunity and constraint – space to develop the idea, and the responsibility of placing it within a museum context shaped by both natural science and art.

During early concept development, Sam spent time in QVMAG’s natural sciences collection, consulting closely with in-house experts. “I kept coming back to a spider,” he says. “It’s something I can relate to, something I know quite well.”

That knowledge wasn’t just emotional; it was anatomical. As the sculpture developed, the technical challenges quickly asserted themselves. Unlike the human figure – where gravity, posture and access points are familiar – the spider presented an entirely different problem. “Normally with figurative work, you can kind of get into the sculpture from a point where it's either resting on something, or there's access inside the sculpture,” Sam explains. “With this, there’s no access anywhere.”

Image: Sam Jinks works on Eternal Return at the Art Gallery at Royal Park. Photo: QVMAG.

The solution was to dismantle the spider before it even existed as a whole. The abdomen, thorax and internal leg structures were all sculpted as separate components, to be reunited later. “Definitely the hardest part was the central section,” he admits. “I found it hard to mould, hard to cast, and still give me room to draw.”

Then there was the hair. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual hairs, applied by hand. Sam approached this with the same care he brings to human skin. “It’s kind of like a dog,” he says, describing layers of fine hair and coarser, more tactile strands. The abdomen would carry sensory hairs, sparse but deliberate, while the legs would bear heavier, coarser hairs around their base – the spider’s primary points of sensation.

Image: Each hair on Sam Jinks' Eternal Return was painstakingly added by hand. Photo: QVMAG.

Every decision was grounded in observation rather than embellishment. The aim wasn’t to exaggerate, but to be faithful and to let accuracy do the work.

Perhaps the biggest leap of faith came at the end: suspension. Eternal Return was designed to hang from the rafters, its body hovering in space. Sam had never rigged a sculpture like this before. “I was just, fingers crossed it’s strong enough,” he says, half-joking, half-serious. The intention was for light to pass through the form, softening its presence in an otherwise dark space. But as with all exhibitions, the reality remained uncertain. “You just hope that all the planning and contingencies fall into place.”

Image: Sam Jinks inspects Eternal Return with QVMAG Exhibition Officer Tobias Jahke. Photo: QVMAG.

Seeing the work installed was a moment of reckoning. “I think I’m still slightly shell-shocked,” Sam admits. “I was reasonably confident – but it was all theoretical.” Watching the spider finally hang, occupy space, and hold itself together was something else entirely. “Actually seeing it come together,” he says, “it’s pretty special.”

There was relief, too, in how the work translated photographically – an increasingly important consideration. “That’s often half the battle,” Sam notes. “If it doesn’t read well in a photo – because most of these works exist as photographs.” Eternal Return did read well. More than that, it carried presence.

“It’s got the right energy,” he says. “It certainly reads as a spider.”

Image: Eternal Return was inspired by Tasmanian orb-weaving spiders. Photo: QVMAG.

Interestingly, it was the legs that proved most confronting. Through lighting decisions, some emphasis was deliberately reduced. “There’s a sort of lizard-brain thing with spiders,” Sam explains. “You respond viscerally, unconsciously.” By softening those triggers, the sculpture shifts from threat to contemplation.

For QVMAG, the commission represents a significant development. As Lead Curator Dr Kellie Wells explains, “this large sculpture… honours the endemic Tasmanian orb-weaving spider.

"It marks a 20-year dream of Sam’s and is a remarkable artistic shift – fusing his commitment to anatomical precision with new forms of symbolic and ecological resonance.”

At approximately three metres in scale, the work is both intimate and monumental. “Rather than monstrous, its grand scale evokes the delicate architecture of nature and the quiet intelligence of non-human life.” Kellie reflects.

Image: QVMAG's Kellie Wells with Eternal Return. Photo: QVMAG.

For QVMAG, this commission extends beyond the gallery. “This is more than a new acquisition. It is a public statement of belief,” Wells says. “When a local government invests in art of this scale and calibre, it is investing in cultural leadership, in education, and in the creative lives of its people.”

Importantly, it also speaks to access. “Art like this doesn’t just belong in capital cities,” Wells emphasises. “It belongs in the hearts of communities – in galleries where all can stand together and wonder.”

In the end, Eternal Return doesn’t demand fear or fascination. It simply hangs, suspended between life cycles, science and memory. Like much of Sam Jinks’ work, it asks us to look closely – not just at the creature itself, but at the patterns we recognise, the instincts we carry, and the quiet repetitions that shape the natural world around us.

Sam Jinks, Eternal Return 2025.

A spider descends, lays a golden egg, and dies. Later, one of its offspring builds a new web in the same place, repeating the same pattern.

Inspired by Schrödinger's questions: "Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours?" – this work reflects on how life repeats itself through form and behavious, in turn raising the question –
Is what returns truly new?

Silicone, resin, hair, nylon, steel, aluminium, gold leaf, 320 x 130 x 68 cm.
Commissioned for Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. Photo: QVMAG.

 

 

 

 

 

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